Opiniões dos críticos

“Boston Strangler” suffers from an oppressively drab style, with a surfeit of dim lighting, muted colors and arty compositions. Yet the film still mostly works, thanks to Ruskin’s other angle: interrogating how the meaning of this story changes over time.

The stars’ performances are rather wasted in Matt Ruskin’s [Boston Strangler], which blurs the story’s timeline without creating purposeful drama.

[Boston Strangler] wants to be the Beantown Zodiac so bad it’s damn near distracting... [That it] gets nowhere near that level of storytelling or filmmaking is a given, since few films do. Yet the way it keeps aping that prefab visual palette — a sort of Serial Killer Moral Rot 101 template — almost feels like its aiming for a shortcut in terms of narrative stickiness and cinematic sickliness.

Knightley, in a performance as crisp as the corners of an envelope, makes McLaughlin’s perseverance—and the pressures she faced as she also tried to be a good wife and mother—deeply believable. And the movie ends on the proper note of uncertainty.

[Boston Strangler] looks astounding, with inky noir frames and a cold blue sheen throughout. It’s only missing one key ingredient. Dramatic tension. For an impeccably stylish film about murder, it’s strangely flat. Which is not great.

[Boston Strangler] assumes David Fincher's "Zodiac" as a main personality trait. But while this movie only carries over Fincher's pale greens and sullen tone and less so that film's general edginess, Ruskin's flawed tribute to Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole can still entertain due to the feats of journalistic competency and courage it's packed with.

What a welcome rarity Boston Strangler is, even in its limits: a sturdy, thoughtfully constructed movie featuring a compelling story and host of great actors... Boston Strangler does not dwell at any pole; it’s not toss-off streaming chum, nor is it steeply angled toward awards success. It stands comfortably in the middle, perhaps reminding the studio gods how things were once done, and can be again.

[Loretta McLaughlin's] role is perfect for Knightley, who has always been able to slot seamlessly into earlier eras. But Ruskin’s wan, emotionless screenplay — shockingly bloodless for a movie about more than a dozen murders — fails to give the character a single believable relationship... “Boston Strangler” is a dreary, painfully stylized slog.

A distant cousin to “Zodiac,” with splashes of “Seven” mixed into its homages, this thriller falls short of its influences yet carves out a small space of its own. It makes a searing indictment of the sloppy, sexism-laced police work that might’ve resolved the case, and pays tribute to the two women who broke the investigation wide open.

There is so little dramatic excitement to [Boston Strangler]. Where is the tension? Where is the suspense? Where is the macabre horror? A director like Jonathan Demme or David Fincher would have gone for the jugular on this kind of material, but writer-director Matt Ruskin seems a little squeamish and keeps everything on the right side of contemporary taste. The chill of fear is missing.

If there’s a copycat at large in this case, the finger of suspicion falls on writer-director Matt Ruskin, who borrows so much from the playbook of David Fincher’s Zodiac we start to lose faith in his specific vision.

Ruskin’s film is content just to follow the facts of how the case was broken, making for a very functional tale that doesn’t leave viewers with much to chew on after that chyron tells them what they may already know about this infamous case. And that feels like a missed opportunity.