Filmed theater has its merits, the primary one being accessibility, but it seldom comes even close to matching the proximal experience of being there. Which makes David Mamet’s compelling screen version of his latest play, Henry Johnson, a curious anomaly. Rather than attempting to open out this characteristically talky, structurally stagey drama — four two-character scenes threaded together by narrative ellipses — the writer-director fully embraces the theatricality of the work. Reassembling the excellent cast from the low-profile 2023 premiere in Los Angeles, Mamet reels us in with some of his most trenchant writing in years.

To be clear, this is an actual movie, not to be confused with a live-capture quickie, in which cameras record a performance on stage. Real sets — a law firm office, a prison cell, the library at the same incarceration facility — replace a stripped-down, intimate staging in a black-box space. Beyond that, few concessions appear to have been made in the jump from one medium to another, and yet the modest, low-budget movie never feels stage-bound or static.

The Bottom Line Mamet’s writing can still crackle like wildfire.