A Talent for Murder (2026) * * *

Directed by: Anton Corbijn

Starring:  Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke, Juliet Stevenson

Patricia Highsmith was among the most popular writers of the 20th century, as well as among the most irascible if A Talent for Murder is to believed.  It allows Helen Mirren to dig her claws into playing Highsmith as she verbally spars with agent Edward Ridgeway (Ehrenreich), who visits her home in Switzerland to convince her to write another Tom Ripley novel.  Edward is a huge Ripley fan, and uses his knowledge of the character to try and talk Patricia into one more go-round.  Patricia, who at first dismisses Edward out of hand, but then decides to humor him, tasks Edward to dream up the next Ripley story.  It is here where A Talent for Murder envisions Edward as Ripley and a young woman he met on the train ride through the Alps named Clementine as Ripley's next mark.  Is Edward closer to Tom Ripley than he would like to admit?  Is the entire movie simply dreamed up by Patricia?  The movie plays with those and other possibilities.

A Talent for Murder is never quite as tense or introspective as, say, The Talented Mr. Ripley is.  But despite that, watching Mirren tear into Edward and the publishing industry in general is amusing.  The movie even toys with the notion that Patricia, when inspired, could be a killer herself.  Most of the movie focuses on the next potential Ripley novel, which seems rather simple considering the source subject and the themes encountered in other Ripley novels.  But maybe A Talent for Murder isn't as much about the book within the movie, but about how well we think we know Patricia and Edward and, under the right circumstances, could they be persuaded to kill?

A Talent for Murder works also because of its atmosphere.  The movie has a perpetual late-afternoon, early evening feel in which the lighting suggests looming darkness in both the action and the characters.  It's quite effective and it's also interesting that Ehrenreich can stand toe-to-toe with Mirren as a worthy adversary.  Maybe he is Tom Ripley after all.  

Clayface (2026) * * *

 

Directed by:  James Watkins

Starring:  Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, Eddie Marsan, David Dencik, Joshua James, Joana Ribiero

I never heard of Clayface, but I read up a little on it and it has been published with DC Comics starting in 1940.  He's a hero who becomes an anti-hero and then a villain, mostly because the untested, but revolutionary cell repair serum our hero Matt Hagen (Harries) is administered delivers escalating and dangerous results.  

As Clayface opens, Matt is a rising superstar actor who learns he is nominated for an Academy Award while on the set of his next film.  He and his lifelong friend Corey (James) go out on the town in Gotham and Matt sleeps with a mobster's girlfriend.  The mobster, Markos Szabo (Dencik) doesn't take kindly to this development and cuts Matt's face to ribbons.  With his looks gone, Matt's stardom dries up.  His manager (Marsan) dumps him and then embezzles all of Matt's earnings, and Matt is unable to sue successfully or pursue criminal charges because Markos has the police and courts in his back pocket.

Following multiple, fruitless surgeries which leave him still deformed and scarred, Matt discovers an experimental serum invented by Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Ackie) which is still untested on humans.  Matt desperately decides to become the human guinea pig.  For a short time, the experiment works, until Matt's face one night contorts into odd shapes.  Further treatments yield results such as the skin's ability to repair itself immediately and then, if under the proper amount of stress, Matt's face can transform into someone else's.  Once this discovery is made, Matt uses this advantage to seek vengeance against Markos and his cronies.  

It is here where Clayface reminds me of Darkman (1990), the Sam Raimi thriller in which a scientist manufactures masks which allows him to assume anyone's identity for 100 minutes, which is when the mask begins to melt.  Clayface disposes of the middle man and allows Matt to simply allow himself to assume someone else's face.  Clayface is noir in every fiber of its being, and it is also involving as not just a revenge thriller, but a meditation on the fleeting nature of fame.  Matt is a sympathetic hero, but only so much as you'll see as the movie progresses.  After all, Clayface's atmosphere doesn't allow for it to have a happy ending.  You'd be surprised how well it works. 

  

Grumpier Old Men (1995) * * *

 

Directed by:  Howard Deutch

Starring:  Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Sophia Loren, Ann-Margret, Burgess Meredith, Kevin Pollak, Daryl Hannah

As with Grumpy Old Men (1993), Grumpier Old Men covers most of the same ground chronicling two frenemies named John and Max (Lemmon and Matthau) discovering loves in their old age.  Their friendship is on-again, off-again, calling each other "moron" and "putz" while living next door to each other and nursing old grudges and jealousies.  In the initial film, John and Max fall for a free-spirited woman named Ariel (Ann-Margret) with John winning her hand.  In Grumpier Old Men, with John out of the way, Max falls in love with a woman named Maria (Loren), who is opening up an Italian restaurant where John and Max's favorite bait shop used to be.

Max and Maria dislike each other at first, but soon warm to each other and fall in love.  We also have a subplot surrounding the pressures of Max's son Jacob (Pollak) and John's daughter Melanie (Hannah) and their future nuptials, while John and Max can't help but overstep when they book a local bar to hold the reception.  Like Grumpy Old Men, Grumpier Old Men is worthwhile thanks to Lemmon and Matthau's effortless and endless chemistry.  The movie deals with its plots in a sitcom manner, but it's pleasant.  

Then you have John's father (Meredith) who steals scenes with his frank dialogue and his endless libido which comes into full display when hitting on Maria's mother (who disapproves of Max of course, a typical subplot in these types of movies).  While reviewing Grumpier Old Men, I realize a review of the initial film won't be necessary.  I would award the original three stars also for many of the same reasons I award it to this sequel.  It lets Lemmon and Matthau do their stuff, and that's more than enough.  

The Company Men (2010) * * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  John Wells

Starring: Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, Rosemarie DeWitt

The Company Men begins with layoffs at a company called GTX, which is closing locations, consolidating facilities, and downsizing in order to maximize profits in an unstable economy.  Sales director Bobby Walker (Affleck) confidently believes his job will be saved, but he is delivered the bad news with a severance package, a spot for three months at a job search center where he can polish his resume and try to remain hopeful that another job is right around the corner.  Meanwhile, he has a posh suburban Boston home, a Porsche, and a wife named Maggie (DeWitt) who understandably realizes the family may need to trim expenses.  Bobby spends the first months in denial, thinking that he'll have a job in a jiff, but soon he finds himself working with his contractor brother-in-law Jack (Costner) building homes.  How good is Bobby at carpentry?  Well, he's a much better corporate salesman.

Also on the chopping block are Phil Woodward (Cooper), one of the first employees of GTX back when it was starting out as a mere shipbuilder and is now nearing 60 with even bleaker employment prospects than Bobby.  Then, there is Gene McClary (Jones), who along with GTX CEO Jim Salinger (Nelson) founded the original company which grew into this corporate monster that itself is ripe for sale to an even larger corporate fish.  Gene, despite his riches, believes the company should show more loyalty to men like Bobby and Phil, but Jim explains that the goal of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value.  They are the eternal "show me the money" people.  Gene also finds himself out of a job when he butts heads with Jim one too many times. 

If anything, Jack runs his small contracting company like Gene feels GTX should run.  Jack has two employees and takes on jobs which may not even be profitable just to keep his team working through the winter.  It's all relative, but The Company Men isn't naive enough to believe that corporations would ever behave like Jack.  As a man of a certain age, I can feel the most for Phil, who has no safety net once his employment is terminated.  In a sense, his life is gone too.  But with Phil and Bobby, we feel the squeeze as mortgage payments and car payments simply don't go away because you no longer have a job.   With that tightening comes our sympathy and in some cases empathy.

However, The Company Men ends with a sense of hope which comes just at the right time for Bobby and unfortunately too late for Phil.  It's less bleak than what happens to many people in the same situation.  As a movie depicting such sad events, The Company Men hums along with solid performances and maybe a sense of gratitude for those who have a job and maybe realize that going to a sucky job is worse than not having a sucky job to go to.  

Whalefall (2026) * * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Brian Duffield

Starring:  Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, John Ortiz, Elisabeth Shue, Jane Levy, Emily Rudd

Whalefall is not Jaws with a whale substituting for a shark.  It's two stories in one:  A young man coming to terms with his relationship with his deceased father and the same young man who winds up in a whale's digestive tract while deep sea diving.  Whalefall combines these stories in a manner so that there is suspense in each one.  Will Jay (Abrams) survive the whale and will he learn to understand his erratic father Mitt (Brolin) who committed suicide one year prior?  Will Jay's ability to forgive and understand his father allow him to escape his present dilemma?  

First thing's first:  How does one escape the stomach of a whale before he's either disintegrated by stomach acid or churned into bits?  Unless Jay (or we) have a working knowledge of whale anatomy, we wouldn't know how to escape, which lends Whalefall plenty of scary, claustrophobic moments.  Heck, he wouldn't know which way to travel to even have a chance of seeing daylight again.  Flashbacks to Jay's interactions with Mitt act as a respite from Jay's current impossible situation by dealing with another one from the past. 

Whalefall belongs to Brolin.  His performance is the most fascinating due Mitt's unpredictability.  There are scenes in which he is tender and loving, while others where he is a mean son of a bitch.  He commits suicide by jumping off the side of his charter boat with weights attached to him so he'd drown rather than wither away from cancer, but was it also a way out of his own personal pain?  Brolin never shows us all the cards and doesn't need to.  We just know we're drawn to him, and makes us believe that Jay would dive into the ocean not only to look for his remains (which would be impossible after one week let alone one year), but to solve the eternal mystery that was Mitt.  Oh, and then there's the matter of the whale's belly and surviving that while trying not to run out of oxygen.  I forgot to mention that.  

The Social Reckoning (2026) * * *

 

Directed by:  Aaron Sorkin

Starring:  Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Bill Burr, Betty Gilpin, Wunmi Mosaku

The Social Reckoning kept my interest while failing to emotionally engage me.  Writer-director Aaron Sorkin (who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for 2010's The Social Network) continues his mastery of verbal volleyball between characters while making the argument that Facebook's willful use of algorithms radicalized people with constant exposure to hate groups and hate speech that led directly (or indirectly) to the riots on January 6, 2021.  Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook policing its content is not its job, and I can't say I disagree with the position.  More on that later.

The Social Reckoning stars Oscar-winner Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, a dedicated Facebook employee who finds herself willing to turn over evidence of Facebook wrongdoing once a friend of hers posts anti-DEI rhetoric in a confrontation with police, which is shown in an effective prologue.  Frances wants to know how her friend, who was mostly apolitical and happy, suddenly transformed into an angry, drunken, and argumentative influencer.  Frances works with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (White), who finds Frances is the only Facebook employee willing to talk to him and break her non-disclosure agreement.  

As played by Madison, Frances is intelligent and socially awkward, which are two reasons she is reluctant to trust Jeff.  However, she is blown away in both of those departments by Jeremy Strong's Zuckerberg, who raises Jesse Eisenberg's cold and socially awkward Zuckerberg to the tenth power here.  Strong doesn't play Zuckerberg to be even remotely likable and Sorkin is content to make him the arrogant villain who asks for advice and ignores it anyway.  The man advising him not to be such a prick is Charlie, played by Bill Burr in an engaging performance as someone trying to stop Zuckerberg from driving the company straight off a cliff in the court of public opinion.  Zuckerberg abandons the company's initial mission statement to be one where people connect and instead opts for a version which tears people apart and ends friendships and familial relationships.  Why?  Mostly because leaning towards Republicans, who favor deregulation in business, would be a financial win for the company.  It's a practical decision and one can argue it was best for shareholders who want to see a monster return on their investments.

I admired the performances in the movie while understanding The Social Reckoning is an invitation to thought.  I'm of the belief that it isn't a platform's job to fact check anything, of which Facebook agrees.  I'm reminded of Bill Maher's editorial from a few years back stating that protecting someone from the world is a mother's job, not a social media platform's.  With the advent of AI, some posts all over Facebook and other sites are clearly lies, but it's up to the user to determine what's true.  It's ironic that in a world with so much information at its fingertips, some people are more misinformed than ever. 

American Hostage (2026) * * * (series on MGM Plus)

 

Starring:  Jon Hamm, Giovanni Ribisi, Mireille Enos, Kristoffer Polaha, Adam Arkin, Jonathan Tucker, William Jackson Harper

Maybe Tony Kiritsis saw Dog Day Afternoon and was inspired to involve the media in his kidnapping of mortgage banker Dick Hall.  Tony (Ribisi) is a frustrated Indianapolis Korean War veteran who feels his mortgage company is up to shenanigans as it forecloses on his business.  He takes Hall (Polaha) hostage at the bank with a shotgun tied to his neck and walks him from the bank to his apartment.  Tony demands to be interviewed by the local news station's Fred Heckman (Hamm), who Tony believes will give him a fair shake and allow him to voice his pent-up anger at Hall and the world in general.

Fred is an old-school reporter who wants to get back to covering the news instead of just reporting it.  He has a pending offer from a large New York station that promises grand things to Fred, but he's not sure he wants to leave Indy.   However, the Tony/Dick Hall saga places Fred into the middle of the story, and in some ways he becomes the story.  Fred Heckman differs from other Jon Hamm characters because, at least through the first four episodes, he is shown to be a loving family man with no trace of Don Draper or Special Agent Adam Frawley (from The Town) anywhere to be found.  Hamm is quite good here playing an honest and decent man (unless the next episodes throw a curveball).  

Ribisi gives us a kidnapper who may be crazy or may be someone pushed to his limits.  Ribisi provides depth to someone who we think we know, but we find he isn't showing us all the cards.  What throws a monkey wrench into the story is how a growing number of locals sympathize or side with Tony.  Mortgage bankers or corporate types tend to elicit little sympathy from the public, even if the man is a husband and father.  Just watch the Luigi Mangione saga unfold and you'll see all the evidence you need that the previous statement is true. 

American Hostage mostly moves along although I'm sure the episode is upcoming in which the series reverts to the past to tell us more in-depth about Tony and Fred.  Both have their own sad stories to tell, and American Hostage captures a sense of time and place which allows them room to breathe.  There is humor in the shameless actions of Tony's and the station's attorneys who are actually thinking about granting Tony immunity since the bank's actions may be more criminal.  If this isn't an allusion to the Mangione case, then nothing is.