Matt Spicer directs and co-writes an internet-based version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Aubrey Plaza as the desperate outsider looking to hijack a life and make friends in the process, Elizabeth Olsen as the Instagram goddess who invites adoration but not intimacy, Wyatt Russell as the goddess’s dumbly sincere love interest, and Billy Magnussen as the sneering snob who knows when one of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong... And because Spicer has not just empathy but sympathy for his damaged protagonist, he provides a good-guy love interest/landlord in O’Shea Jackson Jr. That sympathy ultimately keeps things from getting as dark as the opening scene — Plaza scrolling through a bride’s overjoyed Instagram feed before crashing the reception and macing the poor girl for not inviting her — might suggest. Instead, he makes Plaza fully human, or at least as fully human as she can be, what with the gaping wound in her soul. As a result, the experience is akin to being kneaded by a cat — now soft paws, now sharp claws, alternatingly sweet and deeply uncomfortable. Which seems about right. (2017) — Matthew Lickona
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