Helen Shaw

False Positive fails to cohere. Glazer and Lee’s script scatters its thematic attention in the last third, which ruptures the movie’s attempt to build dread, and director Lee creates a thin, under-realized world.

Despite — or because of — its candor, the film is careful not to traffic in titillation. Everyone is beautiful, everyone is young, but this movie is made for the people in it, rather than appealing to some creepy, objectifying gaze.

The first half is handsome but coy, the second is messier but stronger and fiercer too.

A perfectly engineered and performed piece of comic cringe.

The movie is dogged by wobbly reasoning and dramaturgical lassitude, but at least one actor tries to spice it up. There are certainly other performers who emerge unembarrassed — Dench does a lovely turn from foolishness into new wisdom, for instance. But D’Arcy is as silly as the film itself and the only one who knows what movie he’s in.

Any good documentary teaches you how to pay attention to something, which is why this one feels like such an overwhelming experience: It teaches you to pay attention to the world, all of it all at once.

I Care a Lot wants to race along like a caper movie; it wants to sting like a satire. But it often winds up fighting itself, paralyzed by its own toxin.

Lana Condor’s comic timing should be getting its own paragraph, dammit, not my shrill complaints about our dysfunctional messaging around higher education. But the film’s own attention to the way romantic comedies operate teaches us to watch it with our guard up.

Sadly, DelGaudio’s showmanship doesn’t always translate to its new medium — now you feel it, now you don’t. But DelGaudio’s oddly yearning text still has power on TV. He hides thorns among the card tricks, prickly questions about identity that don’t disappear with the next shuffle.