Sharper

Sharper is a fun watch, and its changes in narrative and point of view reminded me of the Oceans trilogy. It keeps the audience guessing and boasts strong ...

With changes in the narrative and point of view, it at times reminded me of the Oceans trilogy. Sandra is also a character that changes throughout the film, and Middleton plays every aspect and new characterisation of her excellently. The film is a great watch, though, and the sleek cinematography by Charlotte Bruus Christensen makes everything look bright but also super elegant and clinical. And you can easily see why this is a role that she might enjoy; it allowed her to have fun, play, and constantly give off the aura that she is the smartest one in the room. Revealing too much about the plot feels like a spoiler in and of itself, but going off of what you can learn from the trailer, it tells the story of five people in New York who are connected through a string of cons. This is what Sharper does well; you will be glued to the screen, looking for clues and trying to put the pieces together.

'The Integrity of Joseph Chambers,' starring Clayne Crawford, leads VOD releases and James Gray's 'Armageddon Time' arrives on Peacock.

The era’s malaise provides the backdrop for a coming-of-age story about a rebellious sixth-grader (Banks Repeta) with a high-strung father (Jeremy Strong), a demanding mother (Anne Hathaway), and a sweet old grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) trying to impart a few life-lessons before he passes on. Two friends with a taste for decadent adventure give drug-smuggling a try with disastrous results in writer-director Carter Smith’s queasy psychodrama “Swallowed.” Before heading out to Los Angeles to become a gay porn star, Benjamin (Cooper Koch) lets his up-for-anything pal Dom (Jose Colon) talk him into making some money by swallowing condoms filled with illegal substances and crossing the southern border. In the bone-dry supernatural comedy “The Civil Dead,” Clay Tatum (who also directed and co-wrote the film) and Whitmer Thomas (the other co-writer) play Clay and Whit, old acquaintances from childhood who haven’t spoken in years, even though they both moved from their hometown to Los Angeles. The cast wrote the script on-set along with Ohs; and at times it feels like they’re all at a loss for what to do and say next. And Caron (a prestige-TV veteran who has worked on “Andor” and “The Crown”) has fun playing with the polished surfaces of the spaces where wealthy people dwell — the places where they can’t escape the reflections of their own guilty faces. But for the most part, this is an absorbing and nuanced character sketch, with a well-deployed supporting cast. There’s not a lot of plot in “The Integrity of Joseph Chambers,” so Machoian sometimes lingers longer than necessary on shots of Joe just walking or sitting. Machoian keeps the dialogue to a minimum, letting the quietly expressive Crawford carry a lot of the story with his face and his muttering. As in their previous collaboration, Machoian and Crawford balance the frequently grim subject matter with dark humor, as Joe makes up songs about himself or tries out arguments aloud to justify his various screw-ups. [“The Killing of Two Lovers,” ](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-05-13/review-killing-two-lovers-robert-machoian-clayne-crawford)for another insightful look at one man’s masculine delusions. The best movies about con artists — such as “House of Games” and “The Sting” — ask audiences to question everything we’re seeing, and to wonder if anyone, at any level, is who they say they are. As often happens with these kinds of caper pictures, by the time the story loops back to where we started the coincidences and double-crosses have piled up to such a degree that it’s best not to get too invested in any character’s stated identities or goals.

Julianne Moore and Sebastian Stan are con artists with a master plan in Apple TV+'s slick new psychological drama, Sharper. With their eyes set firmly on hedge ...

Turns out Tom and Sandra were in on the final con together. So now everything is theirs, and Sandra gets to strut out of the airport victorious. First thinking it was Max who had orchestrated a big con to eventually run off with Sandra, it slowly dawns on the couple that Sandra hasn't returned to her seat. Sandra (who's now gone back to being called Sandy) asks Tom out to dinner, and he accepts. With Tom dead, the foundation reverts back to her anyway as a trustee, so she's lost nothing. A struggle ensues and Sandra shoots Tom in the stomach. As Tom bleeds out on the floor, Madeline panics and believes he's dead. When the gang is back together, Sandra lunges at Max, wanting an apology, something he refuses to give because he's not sorry that he did it. Until this point, he'd hidden his family's wealth from her but happily calls in the favour with his father because she needs it so badly. Unsure whether he could trust Tom with the inheritance due to his previous mental health break, Richard instead leaves him his foundation. The plan works beautifully, with Tom swept along by the enigmatic Sandra, who wanders into his bookstore as his perfect woman. After spotting junkie Sandy in a bar, he recruits her to be his new partner-in-crime.

Sharper is a slick and stylish, but flawed con man thriller. The Sebastian Stan and Julianne Moore-led film premieres Friday, February 17 on Apple TV+.

The film feels, in many ways, like a homage to the kind of modest genre thrillers that were commonplace in the 1990s. For most of its runtime, the film is a slick and efficiently well-told con man thriller, one that delights in keeping its audience on its toes just as much as it does in embracing its fictional con artists’ cold-hearted tactics. Sharper, in other words, makes the same mistake as so many of the con man movies that have come before it. The film’s final flashbacks rely, therefore, on viewers buying into the idea that Sharper‘s characters weren’t ever as intelligent as we’d been led to believe, which might have been easier to accept had its first hour not done such a good job of showing us otherwise. For most of the movie’s runtime, Gatewood and Tanaka maintain such a steady, controlled flow of information that it becomes easy to stay invested in Sharper‘s various twists, turns, and acid-tongued conversations. Caron’s emphasis on Sharper‘s various shades of blues, reds, and blacks also combines well with the shadowy cinematography that Charlotte Bruus Christensen brings to it. Behind the camera, director Benjamin Caron fills Sharper with enough intimate close-ups and smooth dolly shots to give the film a sleek, considered polish that only makes the sexy, duplicitous nature of its story that much more palpable. Even more importantly, it gives the film a chance to present certain details and events in a nonlinear fashion that doesn’t require it to constantly overexplain their importance to the audience. Tom falls hard for Sandra, so much so that he’s immediately willing to loan her $350,000 to bail her unseen brother out of a bad situation the moment she mentions it. Through a series of subsequent chapters, Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka’s script reveals that Sandra was not, in fact, a kindhearted and well-read student who just so happened to walk into Tom’s bookstore one day. One night, while Tom (Justice Smith), the naïve son of a rich businessman (John Lithgow), is preparing to close the New York City bookstore that his father bought for him, he’s approached by Sandra (Briana Middleton). As a matter of fact, every time the film cuts to a new title card bearing a different character’s name, it’s easy to imagine a reality in which Sharper’s story has been stretched out to accommodate a Netflix or [Apple TV+](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/new-on-apple-tv-plus/) limited series.

Sharper is the latest Apple TV+ movie to hit the platform. Here is where you've seen the cast before.

The actor also had a starring role in one of my [favorite video game adaptations](https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2489648/the-best-video-game-movies-including-detective-pikachu), Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, and is set to have a starring role in the upcoming [2023 film, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves](https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2573008/dungeons-and-dragons-quick-things-we-know-about-the-chris-pine-movie). Last but not least, we have John Lithgow, who is arguably one of the biggest names on this list and has been in Hollywood for a long time. Big nerd and lover of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire. [plenty of other great movies](https://www.cinemablend.com/streaming-news/sebastian-stan-what-to-watch-if-you-like-the-marvel-actor) during his time in Hollywood, starting off with a lot of smaller movies and moving into bigger ones that won him a lot of praise. [sexy Amazon Prime movie](https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2552561/the-sexiest-movies-on-amazon-prime-you-can-stream-right-now), The Voyeurs, Paper Towns, and both Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and its sequel, Jurassic World: Dominion. [The Hunger Games franchise,](https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/all-of-the-hunger-games-movies-ranked) where she played one of the villains, as well as her Academy-Award winning role in Still Alice. But she has appeared in movies such as The Tender Bar, and Augustus. He was also a part of the TV film, Paterno. [Marvel Cinematic Universe](https://www.cinemablend.com/superheroes/marvel-cinematic-universe) movies. [some awesome movies](https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2567126/the-best-apple-tv-movies-to-watch-right-now) over the last few years, ever since the service's launch. Next up is Sebastian Stan, another one of the main stars, and he plays Max. From the [Academy-Award winning CODA](https://www.cinemablend.com/streaming-news/coda-what-to-know-about-the-best-picture-oscar-winning-movie), to some of the latest films like Causeway, the streamer has been knocking it out of the park with some of its original films.

Julianne Moore and Sebastian Stan topline a throwback movie about con artists that maybe could have worked when movies were allowed to be titillating.

It bears the stench of everything somehow working out despite it all. [Julianne Moore](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/gloria-bell-julianne-moore-804440/) and [Sebastian Stan](https://twitter.com/rollingstone/status/1569510551599857664) as a pair of ne’er-do-wells who’ve mastered the art of intimate thieving. A lack of humanity is low on these characters’ laundry lists of personal issues. The movie’s got the lifestyle-envy sleekness of a commercial for a luxury sedan, a glossiness meant to remind us that certain of these characters have no souls, only surfaces and empty gestures and a gluttony for dollar bills. One of these people is lying to the other — a “sharper,” per the movie’s title, is a con artist. It’s also trying to tell us that everything playing out in front of us is sexier than it really is. Most deceptions are cleared up within the space of a scene or two; the movie is trying to tell us that lying, for these people, is second nature, hardly a secret worth keeping once the damage is done. We have fun because we’re expected to want to figure it all out, to get one step ahead of people who’ve read the script and know how this all ends. Deception, in this arena, is as tricksy as a chess match, only — if the movie is worth watching — the contestants emerge afterward with self-satisfied blood on their muzzles. It’s bigger than the two of them and their booklice. ( [John Lithgow](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/john-lithgow-rudy-giuliani-stephen-colbert-late-show-902568/), who is solid here, plays an unlucky billionaire.) How they connect to Tom and Sandra is a secret best left to the movie, though it isn’t very interesting — few of Sharper’s twists, if we can call them that, are. It proceeds in the style of a Russian doll, with a series of subsequent chapters, each named for a character, that lays out when, what, and how each major character — each liar — got here.

Sharper star Briana Middleton talks about the lessons learned from working with co-star Julianne Moore on set of the Apple TV+ psychological thriller.

“Love is one of the things that maybe all of our characters are searching for in this film. “It really takes the pressure off of having to have this really polished performance.” In its exploration of human nature, Sharper grapples with the harsh realities of what people are willing to do to survive but also what people are willing to do for love. “Is it a love story?” Middleton ponders the question. “I love prep and research,” the actress says of her process. At times, she had to work to distance herself from the part and remind herself that she was playing a role: “I do think this stuff lives in your body, especially after doing it so many times and living in it.” “There’s this idea that you need to go away and do your thing, do your prep. “Thank God, everyone’s so nice,” the relative newcomer says of her castmates. It was Middleton’s connection to her character that helped her push through those more difficult scenes. Then, you have to come and do this really polished, finished performance. What begins as a picture-perfect love story between Sandra and Tom (Justice Smith) slowly unravels, as the story reveals its characters are not who they appear to be. Upon reading the script, the New Orleans-based actress says she immediately was won over by her character.

The film was released in theaters last week and arrives on Apple TV+ Friday. On Hulu, the third and final season of Animaniacs, the Steven Spielberg-produced ...

The options above only scratch the surface, so you know that this weekend’s full lineup will have amazing options for what to watch this weekend! Patrick Stewart returns as Jean-Luc Picard, and though he has encountered old friends in seasons one and two, in the new season he’s basically getting the whole Enterprise crew back together: LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner, Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd will all appear in the third and final season of the hit Paramount+ original series. In Sharper, Sebastian Stan plays Max, a grifter, Julianne Moore is Madeline, a woman dating a billionaire, and John Lithgow plays said billionaire, Richard Hobbes. Want to know more about these highlights and the rest of the stellar weekend lineup? The film was released in theaters last week and arrives on Apple TV+ Friday. With so many great new shows and films to choose from, let us here at Decider help you figure out

Feb. 17 (UPI) -- Neo-noir thriller Sharper, animated comedy series Animaniacs, retro-future dramedy Hello Tomorrow and fantasy crime series Carnival Row are ...

[ air Sunday on](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2023/01/16/bafta-host/9271673877534/) BBC One and will be available to stream via the BBC iPlayer and Britbox streaming app. [will feature the 21st annual](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/aarp-the-magazine-announces-nominees-for-the-annual-movies-for-grownups-awards/14278/) Movies for Grownups Awards with AARP the Magazine at 9 p.m. Grant hosts this year's ceremony, [which will be attended](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2023/02/10/Prince-William-Kate-Middleton-attend-BAFTA-Film-Awards/2871676046032/) by Prince William, president of BAFTA since 201, and Kate Middleton, following the couple's two-year absence from the event. [premieres Friday on](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2023/01/09/Carnival-Row-final-season-trailer/9451673285952/) Prime Video. [ streams Friday on](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/Movies/2023/01/12/Sharper-trailer-Julianne-Moore-Sebastian-Stan-Apple-TV/6691673541136/) Apple TV+. The revival of 1990s animated series Animaniacs returns for a third and final season Friday on Hulu.

We discuss the ending of the 2023 Apple TV+ film Sharper which will contain significant spoilers and plot points.

He pays out his team at the bookstore, and Sandra asks Tom to dinner. However, Madeline calls Max the next day to tell him that she is staying with Richard and he can keep the money. Tom is made head of the charity. Tom steals back his inheritance by running a con game on Madeline, tricking her into transferring the money to Tom’s charity! She is shaking down Sandra and the rest of the prisoners on her payroll. All three are made to leave New York and board a plane when Sandra goes to the bathroom before taking off. Tom has money from his wealthy father and gives Sandra the money. He has a friend pretending to be a police officer and arresting him for attempting to buy drugs. Tom pays for the book, and she shows up the next day with the money. Max takes Sandra under his wing to teach her how to be a con artist. Richard offers Max a job for $60,000 a month to travel around on the company’s dime (and out of Richard’s home). She is looking for a book for her professor,

Julianne Moore and Sebastian Stan star in the new film from The Crown and Andor director Benjamin Caron.

[subscribe now](http://radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription?utm_term=evergreen-article). Meanwhile, during this earlier scam, Max had realised that Hobbes's son Tom (Smith) could also be a potential victim, and working with his new accomplice Sandra (Middleton) he manages to con him out of a huge amount of money. Tom's death had been staged, he is still alive and she has therefore given all the money away to him This leads to a major confrontation at the end of the film which sees Madeline shooting Tom dead. It also has a non-linear plot that takes a lot of turns over the two-hour runtime, all leading up to one massive final twist. [Film](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/) coverage or visit our [TV Guide](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/tv-listings/) and [Streaming Guide](https://www.radiotimes.com/streaming-guide/) to find out what’s on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the [Radio Times View From My Sofa podcast](https://www.radiotimes.com/audio/podcasts/). [terms and conditions](https://www.immediate.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/) and [privacy policy](https://policies.immediate.co.uk/privacy/). [The Crown](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/the-crown-season-6-release-date/) and [Andor](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/andor-episodes-release-schedule-disney-plus/), and boasts a starry cast that includes the likes of Julianne Moore and Sebastian Stan. [Apple TV+](https://www.radiotimes.com/appletv/) film [Sharper](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/sharper-apple-tv-tinker-tailor-inspiration-exclusive-newsupdate/) is definitely one for you. [learn more](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/commercial-links-on-radiotimes-com/)) [Subscribe to Radio Times magazine and get 12 issues for £1](https://www.radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription/?utm_term=evergreen-article)

You might not follow every twist in this tale of con artists working one another, but it's stylish enough to overcome a clunky plot.

Fortunately, there’s a cool, elegant style to “Sharper” that makes passive viewing a pleasure. “Sharper” certainly isn’t the worst example of this plot problem, but it’s not immune to it. In the case of “Sharper,” an agreeable new drama streaming on Apple TV Plus, it covers up an inherent story flaw.