Pure, seductive fun—Anton Corbijn’s new film is a well paced, sophisticated diversion with a lethal performance at its center: Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith. The author of The Talented Mr. Ripley is at the tail end of her career, holed up in a bunker-like house in the Swiss alps, not writing much of anything, when a young editor, Edward Ridgeway, played by Alden Ehrenreich, is sent by her New York publisher to tease a new book out of her. A spikey pas de deux ensues in the glamorous enclosure of Highsmith’s Swiss dacha, while, in parallel, Ehrenreich’s character pursues a love affair with a beautiful American heiress visiting her family (Olivia Cooke). Fiction and reality braid in clever ways as Highsmith ridicules her visitor, and is inspired by him, imagining a sinister plot (which could in fact be real). The subtleties of class and ambition that animate Highsmith’s novels also give A Talent for Murder its charged flair.—TA
Everytime
Films about grief have been ubiquitous during awards season, particularly since COVID (perhaps not coincidentally): Drive My Car, All of Us Strangers, A Real Pain, Hamnet, and Train Dreams, to name a few. Early buzz likened Sandra Wollner’s Everytime to 2022’s Aftersun: Not only are both films set at beachside European resorts but they also share a cinematographer, Gregory Oke, a master at precise, emotionally suggestive framing that gestures toward something beyond what’s happening explicitly. Both films also concern attempts to understand someone who is gone through fragmentary memory, using images as a kind of bridge between the living and the dead. But Everytime is colder and stranger, beginning in observational realism before destabilizing time, point of view, and, eventually, reality. This visually mesmerizing, shattering film is attuned to the cold indifference of life carrying on after catastrophe, even as grief irrevocably transforms those left behind.—LWM
