Category: Entertainment

In “A Talent for Murder,” director Anton Corbijn takes a closer look at writer Patricia Highsmith.

Known for creating everyone’s favorite psychopath Tom Ripley, Highsmith – played by Helen Mirren – became a controversial figure because of her antisemitic and misanthropic statements.

“By all accounts, she was much worse than what we show in the film. You don’t want her to be completely unlikable. It’s difficult when you don’t actually know the person and base everything on hearsay, but she was a very difficult woman. Also to herself,” he tells Variety.

He enjoyed seeing Mirren, now in her 80s, fully embrace the role of someone who can be, well, a jerk.

“She’s a great jerk! I think it’s healthy. It’s never too late to be a bitch. I’m referring to our Highsmith, of course. Luckily, she only killed fictional characters.”

In the film, previously known as “Switzerland” after Joanna Murray-Smith’s play it’s based on – “I thought it would conjure too many images of cows and mountains,” Corbijn says – Highsmith is joined in her Swiss refuge by a young man, Edward (Alden Ehrenreich), who tries to persuade her to write another novel about Ripley.

They don’t exactly bring out the best in each other. Quite the opposite.

“They’re testing how bad people can be and how far they can go. Unfortunately, it’s always further than you’d like to think. Sometimes it has to do with generational trauma that manifests itself, or with human curiosity that leads to certain behaviors. I think it happens quite often: People get curious, and they go too far. That might be the case with Ripley, too.”

Ripley is evil, but he doesn’t look it. In “The American Friend,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” or Netflix’s show “Ripley,” he knows how to charm his victims. That’s his superpower.

“When evil is obvious, it’s not interesting because you know it’s coming. That’s his strength, and I think that’s the strength of the film. You don’t know if you should like them or not,” notes Corbijn.

“I love how Alden can change in very minimal ways. He can be this nerdy guy, and then he can be a mean killer with cold eyes. We got really lucky with this cast.”

While the film emphasizes that the portrayal of Highsmith is “entirely fictional,” this is not the first time that Corbijn has taken on a real-life protagonist. “Control,” about Joy Division’s singer Ian Curtis, was his directorial breakthrough.

“I knew the guy, so I think it’s a very truthful film. With ‘Life,’ I didn’t know James Dean. He died the same year when I was born, so we never got to meet,” he laughs.

“You just fill in the gaps. But even Helen said that there’s something more mysterious about playing real-life characters than the ones you make up. It’s more complex and more interesting.”

Mirren famously portrayed Elizabeth II in “The Queen” and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in “Golda.”

“It can be so powerful, too. Now, when I think of Ian, I think of Sam Riley in the film. I’m so much more familiar with him than with the real Ian Curtis!”

Corbijn first gained prominence as a photographer and music video director, working with the likes of Depeche Mode and U2. However, looking at what’s happening in the music and film industry, he can’t help but worry.

“I get very depressed thinking about A.I. replacing so much in cinema, but it’s the same with music. Take ABBA concerts with their ‘avatars’. Is everything really replaceable? It’s dangerous because we all prefer comfort over substance, and that will be our downfall. Needless to say, there’s no A.I. in my film.”

He adds: “I’m really worried about the immediate future because things are changing way too fast. I think we will respond badly to it. And too late.”

He says he feels “quite pessimistic about the world.” He’s not the only one, which might explain why Ripley keeps on returning.

“It’s as if he returns when the world aligns with his thinking, which is terrible. Maybe people are more accepting of murder today?”

Ben Affleck plays a Brentwood businessman running for Los Angeles mayor in the new thriller “Animals.”

The Oscar winner, who directed and co-wrote the film, is also a longtime political activist who has supported the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Now, his “Animals” cast would like him to run for elected office.

“Maybe they hate me,” Affleck cracked at the “Animals” premiere on Wednesday night in Los Angeles.

Kerry Washington co-stars as Affleck’s wife in the movie. “We keep telling him that he should, but he doesn’t want to,” she told me. “You know, we’re in a place in our politics right now where anything is possible, but I would hope that the people who are running for office want to be there and he has been very explicit in saying that he doesn’t want to run for office.”

Luis Gerardo Méndez plays an undocumented Mexican immigrant in the film who finds himself unexpectedly — and dangerously — thrust into the mayoral hopeful’s life. “I would definitely vote for him,” Méndez said. “Go Ben Affleck! He’s smart and sexy — that’s all you need.”

Affleck, however, isn’t announcing a candidacy anytime soon.

“We don’t ask the question of what are your qualifications to hold public office any longer,” the Oscar winner said. “It’s, ‘You wanna join the circus? Who’s the biggest carny?’ I think that there is a whatever side of the aisle you’re on, one of the interesting things that people can agree on is a collective disappointment with the way that American politics has trended.”

Affleck continued, “There’s nobody alive now who thinks, hey, we’re really doing it right and things are going great and I love this political system. And that’s a problem.”

Being in office, Affleck says, is no longer about serving the people.

“It’s just about money, raising money, it’s just about playing a sort of adolescent game of who can make fun of the other person better or be more reductive and stupid about something rather than actually trying to talk about the issues,” he said. “I think the thing that’s missing from politics, frankly, is you have to lead. You can’t just scare people. You can’t just hector them. You can’t lecture them. You can’t guilt them into it. You’ve got to inspire them. Otherwise they don’t want to vote for you.”

And then he added, “Selfishly, I just see what a difficult grind of a job it is and I’d rather make movies about it.”

Animals will be released on Netflix and in select theaters on Oct. 9.

You want a concert movie to sound great, and plenty of them do. But I don’t think I’ve encountered a concert film that casts the precise kind of sonorous spell that “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall” does. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the movie, which had its premiere tonight at the New York Film Festival, is a record of the solo performance that Cameron Winter gave in front of a packed audience at Carnegie Hall on Dec. 11, 2025. The movie in only 75 minutes long, and it consists entirely of Winter seated at a Steinway grand piano, singing his gorgeous meditative trance tunes, but I swear you’ve never heard a sound quite like this.

The slow rolling piano echoes through the hall like a rhapsody from the deep. The sound is rich, lustrous, bottom-heavy, grand. And that voice! Winter sings in a low baritone (and occasionally a high one) of astonishing power, the notes hanging there in a suspended quaver so bold it’s hypnotic. At different moments, he’ll remind you of a great many other singers. At times he’s a low-octave Thom Yorke, his lost-in-the-haze midnight rapture is like Tom Waits minus the gravel, and there are strong echoes of early Springsteen — the plaintive bard of “Incident on 57th Street” — in his soaring vocal caress, and the wide vibrato of it. The concert may remind you, at times, of John Cale’s great 1992 live album “Fragments of a Rainy Season.” But the artist the Cameron Winter of “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall” is most magically reminiscent of is Bob Dylan — the Dylan who let the words pour out of him in a blissful torrent, and sang them as if possessed. Winter, like Dylan, isn’t just singing. He’s crafting pop songs that add up to an incantation, a rhapsody, a prayer.

At the start of the concert, Winter, very tall, in a black shirt and pants, with shaggy greasy unkempt indie hair (with his thick eyebrows and doleful countenance, he suggests a solemn version of Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas”), lopes onstage and stands in front of the piano, introducing himself with what looks like a slight bow, though it’s so reticent it might just be a hipster stoop. Winter, of course, is the frontman of Geese, the indie-band-of-the-moment who, on the tuneful/tuneless scale, reside somewhere between Wilco and Arcade Fire. Geese are okay, but they’ve been overpraised. Winter’s 2024 solo record, “Heavy Metal,” is much more compelling; it gives voice to the meditative soul inside the noise rocker. “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall” is a showcase for that Cameron Winter, the chanteuse of sadness and faith.

The piano is poised at a slight angle on the bare Carnegie stage, but basically Winter has his back to the audience. It’s not a hostile gesture; it’s a sign of how much he wants the music to dominate. But a movie is a whole other thing, and Paul Thomas Anderson, directing his second music-performance film (after “Junun,” a 2015 Jonny Greenwood-goes-to-India trifle), has crafted a visually spellbinding movie that’s never showy or grandiose. He frames the piano on the stage from different angles, and he brings us up close to Cameron Winter and right into his emotional orbit. There are stage-eye-view shots of the audience (the four balconies of Carnegie Hall separated by three rows of light), and the whole movie is suffused with an orange-yellow glow, as if all of Carnegie were lit by candlelight. It’s a classical sunset church vibe, and it matches Winter’s music, which is all about mystery and heartbreak, which he sings of with a beauty that makes it inseparable from joy.

I could sit here and pretend that I know what Cameron Winter’s lyrics mean, but the truth is they’re often the kind of suggestive poetry that’s diminished by being overanalyzed. The meaning resides in how he sings them, his passion ringing out like a deep dark bell, with shades of accusation and awe running through the performance. He hooks you from the opening number, “It All Fell in the River” (which I think is about the catharsis of tears), he carries you through “If You Turn Back Now” (a relationship drama that finds room for an inquisition on the devil), and he makes you feel the emasculated belittlement of “$0,” but also the stirring declaration that “God is actually real.” The movie culminates in a performance of “Take It With You” (“I found a keepsake of you by the window in the kitchen, babe,/Take it with you when you leave”) that channels the scalded romanticism of Dylan at his most majestic.

Cameron Winter’s solo songs are often beautiful, but most of them move at the same slow tempo, and they don’t have a verse-chorus conventionality. “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall” has the feel of a slow-motion song cycle, like Leonard Cohen’s first album. The movie might have been a touch lugubrious were it not for that voice of Winter’s, which is a miraculous instrument: indie in a low-slung operatic way. In “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall,” he’s possessed by the music he’s singing, so lost in it that you hope he’s never found.