From Owen Gleiberman‘s Sundance review of Joe Berlinger‘s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile: “So how is Zac Efron as Ted Bundy? I think he’s startlingly good: controlled, magnetic, audacious, committed and eerily right.

“With his hair grown out into a sort of Bert Convy ‘do, Efron looks the part just fine, and he uses his insidious charisma to grab us from the start, when Ted, haunting a college bar in Seattle in 1969, meets Liz Kendall (Lily Collins), the single mom who will become his romantic and domestic partner throughout the years of his crimes.

“Ted is a kind of actor, a maniac playing a role, yet doing it with such sincerity and flair that it’s not just a role. It’s the person a part of him wants to be. Ted is the sort of ladies’ man who turns heads when he walks down the street. He’s a charmer, a sexy-eyed player, a catch. But he’s a shrewd enough manipulator to know when to play up that image, and to know how to play against it as well. He woos the naïve, fawn-like Liz, who thinks no man could be interested in a secretary with a small daughter, and when he’s in her presence he puts on a major show of being kind, warm, doting, and gentle.”

Costarring John Malkovich, Angela Sarafyan, Jim Parsons, Haley Joel Osment and Kaya Scodelario. Opening in select theaters and Netflix on 5.3.19.