All Good Things (2010)

Andrew Jarecki's All Good Things arrives dressed as a mystery and leaves as something closer to a cold case file with a romantic bruise. Ryan Gosling plays David Marks, heir to a New York real estate fortune, who marries a working-class woman named Katie and then methodically dismantles her life. The film is based on Robert Durst, and it knows it. The cast is white to the last extra, which happens to match the subjects here, so the absence of any multicultural embroidery reads as fidelity instead of oversight. The 1970s production design does the heavy lifting, all wood paneling and unearned confidence.

Katie's arc gives the film a sliver of social consciousness. She is trapped by a controlling husband and by family money that functions as a leash, and the camera regards her predicament with genuine sympathy. That is the extent of it. This is a true-crime drama, not a manifesto, and it never reaches for a larger argument about women or power. The same holds for the wealth critique. The Marks dynasty is rotten, and the film savors watching it rot, but it stops short of indicting the system that produced it. There is no environmental sermon, no body politics, no examination of neurodivergence, and no reconsideration of the historical record through a contemporary lens. Race is simply not on the agenda. Neither is much of anything else.

A moody thriller that shows instead of tells, the film preaches almost nothing, which in this era is nearly quaint. It is a well-acted, ambiguous, frequently frustrating exercise in restraint. Classify it under wealth, dread, and the quiet cruelty of a family that owns too much.