This movie is so harrowing and disturbing. It's expertly made and Isaiah Washington delivers a terrifying performance, but it was honestly so unpleasant to sit through. The sense of dread that develops near the end of the film is unbearable. As someone that lived in the DC area when these shootings took place it hit a little too close to home. Still, definitely worth seeing. B+

haunting

must see

I watched this film with a certain anxious excitement since I experienced the D.C./Maryland/Virginia sniper murders firsthand as a 12-year-old. I remember well the news of each new shooting and the subsequent atmosphere of desperation and fear. As directed with an eye for overcast, art-house friendly grit and tension by Alexandre Moors, though, Blue Caprice has a strange relationship with the true story on which it is based. In fact, I firmly believe it should have ended before John (played well by Isaiah Washington, slowly revealing the tempest of cruelty and rage beneath a charming surface) and Lee first fire their rifle on the East Coast. The depiction of how the older man encountered the troubled youth in Antigua and traveled with him to Washington State, developing an intimate and combustible father/son relationship along the way, is frightening and riveting, even if the film shies away from engaging with either man too closely. This is clearly the point of fascination for Moors, as well as pointing his tasteful hand-held camera at the Pacific Northwest's more desolate, industrial corners. By turning the duo's notorious crimes into a haphazard, rushed glorified montage and shoehorning it into the final 20 or so minutes of his hour-an-a-half film (the carnage has barely begun before they are arrested at a rest stop), the director only frustrates, ignoring a mountain of true-crime details and playing a string of stunted, anticlimactic notes which undermine the admirable quality of what came before.

B-