Guy Lodge

It’s a flat-footed dud, at once overwrought and underplotted, and barely propped up by A-list stars who look either embarrassed, confused or indifferent to be there.

The film, about two 20-year-olds carrying on their early courtship across the mortal divide, is earnest and a little clunky as it takes a simplistic inspirational approach to complex metaphysical questions. But it is accessible and attractive, shot in glistening monochrome, and could well be a youth-skewing hit for the filmmaker.

Robinson and Jones are a likable enough pairing to make Charlie Harper affecting here and there; making it interesting is a taller order.

It’s a welcome reminder of what Watts, who’s been either ill-used or unchallenged in too many of her recent film vehicles, can do with a role that steps up to her adaptable, slightly unknowable screen presence.

Neither the script nor Arquette’s showy but curdled, stridently one-note performance of terminal misanthropy persuasively draw a line between past and present, and it’s increasingly hard to feel for a character missing this much connective tissue.

The film’s strands never knot to the film’s strands never knot together in quite the complex, devious way that a Highsmith homage really should. But “A Talent for Murder” still has chic pleasures aplenty, beginning with Mirren’s hawkish, caustically funny performance, and extending through the characteristically cool, ambient qualities of Corbijn’s filmmaking. gether in quite the complex, devious way that a Highsmith homage really should.

A high-wire high-concept piece like this stands or falls by the conviction that the actors bring to it, and Comer plays it from the gut. So, for that matter, does Harry Melling.

A faintly absurd Faustian fable blown up to grand guignol proportions through Strippoli’s brash formal command of his favorite genre, The Spiral doesn’t add up to an awful lot, but the sum of its parts is flashily entertaining enough.

While the tone may often feel blithely throwaway, the filmmaking is never careless.

Even when the film strays into anodyne territory, it’s given genuine feeling and integrity by stars Laura Linney and Rhys Ifans, both superb as strangers in rural England who are initially blindsided, and gradually drawn together, by their shared diagnosis.