MALEVOLENT — SHOCKTOBER!

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Punk heart still beating.

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Icelandic director Olaf de Fleur Johannesson takes too long in getting around to the point in a slasher film single-handedly carried by Florence Pugh's sturdy performance.

Angela (Florence Pugh) and her brother Jackson (Ben lloyd-Hughes) are an American brother/sister ghost-expelling team who take their game to Scotland where they plan to run one last scam.

Angela, Jackson, and their teammates Elliot (Scott Chambers) and Beth (Georgina Bevan), bite off more than they can chew when they take on Mrs. Green (Clia Imrie) as a client.

Angela ignores a ton of red flags to interact with the ghosts of children found murdered with their mouths sewn shut 15 years ago.

Olaf de Fleur Johannesson ramps up the tension but plotholes let out most of the steam.

"Malevolent" is based on the novel "Hush" by Konstantopoulos, although you'd never guess that this lightweight ghost story/slasher pic was based on novelistic source material.

TV-MA. 89 mins.

WEWORK: OR THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF A $47 BILLION UNICORN

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Jed Rothstein has a lot to learn about making documentaries. 

Repetitive and redundant to a fault, this overlong doc still manages to put a even a dull point on Adam Neumann's wework con game that makes Anna Delvey's schemes look like un-popped popcorn.

Billions of dollars burn like flash paper.

Douchebag extraordinaire Adam Newmann managed to make renting office space seem like something much sexier, namely a culture for entitled white millennials to pretend as if they were "changing the world."

Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin Rebekah Paltrow Neumann proves to be a piece of work in her own right. Whew. What a terrifying person.

Forbes editor Randall Lane has the best insights on Neumann's outrageous con game that ruined lives and made Neumann a billionaire.

Yes, capitalism is well and thoroughly fucked.

Rated TVMA. 102 mins.

MOLLY'S GAME

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Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut is a polished medium-budget adaptation of Olympic-skier-turned-poker-queen Molly Bloom’s book of the same title. Jessica Chastain is well cast as the title character, a business-minded entrepreneur who became the target of a legal attack from the F.B.I. after running a high-stakes poker in Southern California and midtown Manhattan. 

Molly lucks out when she secures Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) as her legal counsel. Sorkin's creative narrative structure plays as a courtroom drama in reverse. The fun lies with watching an intelligent, independent-minded woman launch a highly profitable business while learning on the fly in the company of big male egos trying to outdo one another. 

Sorkin uses tightly composed scenes, packed with lean dialogue, to form volatile sequences that unite exposition with motivation and visual panache. On-screen graphics embellish poker sequences to telegraph inside information about the hands being played with a voice-over bump. The film isn't want for aside-slipping sense of humor either. This is quality cinematic storytelling. If only Hollywood made more films in the vein of “Molly’s Game.”  

Rated R. 140 mins.