Sharper
2023
**
Director: Benjamin Caron
Cast: Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, Justice Smith, Briana Middleton, John Lithgow, Darren Goldstein, Phillip Johnson Richardson, Kerry Flanagan, David Pittu
Benjamin Caron's feature debut starts as a sweet romance between a New York bookstore owner and a PhD student, but this is the first bit of misdirection in a caper story, which involves con artists, a billionaire, and his heir. Once it's clear that I cannot trust anyone or anything on the screen, the rest of the movie becomes a mechanical, predictable, and increasingly boring sequence of short cons, long cons and double-crosses. The cast is attractive, but when the characters are either duplicitous grifters or gullible idiots, I really don't care how it all ends.
