True crime borrows its stakes from a real case, which raises the question of who the story belongs to. This tag collects reviews and essays on true crime in film and writing, and the ethics attached to it.
CrimeSeptember 29, 2026
You can write a book about your time in prison, and a professional ghostwriter will help. Whether you keep the money, who you can name and what you should never say in an interview are questions for a lawyer before…
2010sSeptember 11, 2026
Extremely Wicked (2019) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A film about Ted Bundy told from his girlfriend's perspective, which is a genuinely good idea, executed by a picture that keeps forgetting she is the protagonist and…
2020sSeptember 11, 2026
The Dahmer - Monster opener rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It is well made, Evan Peters is excellent, and it dramatizes the deaths of identifiable people whose families objected publicly and were not consulted. The craft…
1980sSeptember 11, 2026
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Made for around a hundred thousand dollars, shelved for four years over its rating, and still the film that other films about this subject…
2010sSeptember 11, 2026
Mindhunter's pilot rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Fincher directs an hour about a hostage negotiation failing and a man discovering that the vocabulary he has been given is inadequate. Almost nothing happens, there is no killer…
1970sSeptember 10, 2026
Badlands (1973) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Malick's first film takes a real killing spree and narrates it in the voice of a fifteen-year-old girl who describes murder in the vocabulary of a movie magazine. The…
1960sSeptember 10, 2026
In Cold Blood (1967) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Richard Brooks shot Capote's book in the actual house where the murders happened, cast two unknowns for their resemblance to the killers, and used seven of the…
Book ReviewsSeptember 7, 2026
If you write crime fiction with federal agents in it, you're probably getting something wrong. Jerri Williams spent twenty-six years at the FBI watching novelists and screenwriters miss the mark, and now she's written the corrections.
2000sMay 16, 2026
David Fincher's 2007 procedural on the SF Zodiac killer investigation. Three protagonists, no killer caught.
2000sMay 16, 2026
Ridley Scott's 2007 Frank Lucas biopic. Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe in parallel protagonist tracks.
CrimeMarch 22, 2026
Twenty films and TV episodes that use the serial killer as a lens for examining the world rather than as spectacle — from Silence of the Lambs to Mindhunter. What separates the serious from the exploitative, and what fiction writers…
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