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'Ripley ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A grifter named Ripley living in New York during the 1960s is hired by a wealthy man to bring his wayward son home from Italy. Ripley sees the opportunity of a lifetime to make a killing.

It’s probably a bit unfair, but also quite natural, to compare this miniseries on Netflix to the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley by Anthony Minghella. After all, they are both adaptations from the same novel, written in 1955 by Patricia Highsmith; they both follow pretty much the same main plot points, they have (for the most part) the same characters, and they are filmed in the same Italian locations, and yet the two final products could not be further apart.

I won’t be going into which one is better because it’s a silly argument to have. Just the fact that one is a miniseries, and in eight hours or more can make the story breathe in a way that impossible in a film, makes the comparison pretty pointless from the start.

If anything, this Netflix series proves that there is definitely room for both: the lush technicolor Italy, where passions run wild, and jealousy can lead to murder on one side, and a much colder, darker, seedier version where Ripley, beautifully played with a hint of cold menace by Andrew Scott, who just disappears into this role, is a real sociopath, at times a bit weird and other times truly terrifying (he rarely ever blinks!), but always absolutely mesmerizing.

The choice of filming this in black and white is obviously key to the success of this series, offering the viewers a fresh and compelling perspective on the narrative and its characters. Of course, on the surface, it makes everything feel a lot darker, sinister, colder (it was also filmed during winter), but also more unsettling, and fits perfectly with this new depiction of Ripley. And as it happens, it also makes this one of the best-looking TV series I’ve seen in a long time.

You might not get that romanticism from Minghella’s vision of Italy, and yet every frame can still be hung on a wall: those wet cobbled streets looking so timeless, the southern towns built on stairs, ancient and evocative.

Andrew Scott plays Ripley as a real enigma, just as Highsmith had written about 70 years ago (and yet, it’s a book so modern and fresh that often feels like it could have been written just yesterday). Ripley is a man lacking morality, “a human vacuum,” as described by writer-director Steven Zaillian (the Oscar winning screenwriter of Schindler’s List). He is a much more difficult character to decipher and instantly like than Matt Damon ever was, yet the power of the story is such that pretty soon, we are with him wholeheartedly, and we just don’t want him to be caught.

I loved this series, and the more I think about it, the more I appreciate what it did.

I loved how the series took its time and did not want to rush things. I adored that one of the episodes was basically entirely spent watching somebody trying to get rid of a body (and that cat watching everything!! Brilliant!!).

I loved how it often focused on details that were just red herrings, basically placed there with the only purpose of making us feel jittery, anxious, unsettled, but nothing more than that (I’m talking about the suitcase with evidence against Ripley’s crime, the stains of blood in the bathtub, the ashtray as a weapon of possible murders to come).

These are things that only a TV series of more than eight hours can do. I also loved how authentic it all felt, even to an Italian like me. The locations are real, lived-in, the characters talk the way people really talk, with their different accents, depending on the region they are from, whether they are from the north or the south.

Yes, of course, there are a few clichés here and there, but hey, it’s an American product after all. In Rome, for example, they can’t help but have a nun or two walking in the background at every possible moment.

I was a bit annoyed by the signs at the train station showing names of cities in English as opposed to Italian (something that, especially in the ‘50s, would have never happened), but those are silly minor quibbles in the big scheme of things.

I was willing to get past those tiny faults. In fact, I was quite surprised by how much of the dialogue was in Italian (subtitled obviously). What did bother me a little bit more was the fact that I found Andrew Scott a little bit too old for the part: even though he carries his 50 years very well, Tom Ripley is supposed to be a twenty-something young man, with his whole life ahead and very little to lose, hence the reason why he decides to go to Italy in the first place anyway: because he’s so young.

As it is, both the beginning and the reasons for his decision to go to Italy still feel a bit contrived and slightly forced (as they did in Minghella’s version, to be honest). They only just about get away with it in the novel.

But there is so much to like here.

This is a meticulously crafted piece of filmmaking, the best of classic noir, Hitchcock, Italian cinema of the ‘50s, all in one. A piece of beauty that rewards your patience and is really one of the best things Netflix has ever produced. I binged it in two days and I can’t wait to revisit it again (and there’s a little bit of me that hopes they might adapt the next four Ripley books too!)'

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'The steps of social advancement can hardly be more painful than here: built into the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, covered by vaults and passages, they force Tom Ripley ever further up through the semi-darkness, sweating, breathless. “Le scale, su, su,” the aged postman instructed him downstairs in Italian with a corresponding hand gesture. Dickie Greenleaf is said to be waiting upstairs, where bright light floods a villa for the gods' favorites. The con artist Ripley, who crawled out of his New York rat hole, was given the task by Greenleaf's father to bring the American magnate filius back to the States on a dolce vita detour. Soon Ripley will come up with a plan of his own: to kill his son to take his place.

This is how Patricia Highsmith came up with it in 1955 in her first Ripley crime novel, which Steven Zaillian has now re-adapted as director and screenwriter and had cameraman Robert Elswit shoot it. The result is an eight-part Netflix miniseries of high cinematographic artistry. Faced with two hard-to-top previous adaptations - Anthony Minghella's 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley and René Clément's 1960's Only the Sun Witnessed - Zaillian is starting a new game. Instead of dressing the dark story in the candy colors of the luxury life of a post-war haute volee, he shot in black and white - and calls up cinema history from silent films to film noir, and not just with the recurring staircase motif.

Up and down

Following this, however, is a pleasure of cruel beauty. The fact that we are dealing with a murderer no longer has to be kept a secret with Ripley. Right at the beginning we get to know the man as a capital criminal when he carries a corpse down the stairs of an apartment building - in front of a cat. The original novel does not know this omniscient supporting character. His crime series “The Night Of – The Truth of a Night” – also a remake – proved that Zaillian has a feline soft spot. He gained experience with black and white early on as he wrote the script for “Schindler’s List”. So now “Ripley,” as the series is simply titled, the ambitious reincarnation of a classic that nevertheless lacks the beguiling, lethal magic of its predecessors.

For Zaillian, murder is too serious a business to give evil the mask of an ice-cold angel or the oatmeal health of a boy next door. In the character of Andrew Scott - born in 1976 - Ripley appears as a middle-aged fraud veteran, a guy on the verge of bankruptcy without the youthful beauty of Alain Delon or the nerdiness of Matt Damon in the role. The target, Dickie Greenleaf, now played by Johnny Flynn, is no longer a jazz lover, constantly drunk on his own spumante mood, with heartbreak qualities, as once embodied by Jude Law, but a bland character with a painting habit. The writer friend Marge (Dakota Fanning) appears fresher, if only fashionable: she consistently wears trousers throughout the early 1960s.

And the billionaire's son's best friend? According to the director, there was only one person who didn't cast him as a Ciao Bella bon vivant à la Philip Seymour Hoffman during the casting, and that was Eliot Sumner. Sumner, born as the daughter of the pop musician Sting and now identifying as non-binary, portrays the friend as an ambiguous figure with homoerotic charisma, quiet and distinguished, very contemporary but not very expressive.

Comparisons are all the more obvious today as Netflix makes Minghella's film available to watch alongside the series. But they don't lead very far: the new version is intended to create its own fictional world. Their ruler is Andrew Scott – caught in the role of a Ripley without charisma. The lack of conscience covers his figure like a dusty cloak. The murderer is a bore. However, to make him appear as believably unbelievable when lying as Scott manages to do, someone first has to imitate him. Ripley struggles to get rid of the dead on an epic scale. Zaillian lets Scott wordlessly act out what it means to walk over dead bodies.

We see the mechanics of compassionless thinking in action, but also Ripley's imaginations apart from reality. Little by little we finally get to know the con artist – “con artist” in English – as he develops into a blood perpetrator as a connoisseur of the arts. These seem just wasted on the rich with their Picasso on the wall and their own brushes on the easel.

Images that overlap each other

The baroque painter Caravaggio, also a murderer and master of chiaroscuro, becomes Ripley's obsession. He makes a pilgrimage across the Bel Paese to see his pictures, and so that everyone understands why, he also cuts to Rome in 1606 - a dubious detour. On the other hand, Ripley's interpretation of Caravaggio's image of the biblical David with the severed head of Goliath is almost congenial. The artist's face may be painted with the features of the youthful hero as well as those of the murdered Philistine - as the Romantics later scolded philistines.

Ripley's amoral dual identification shines through on several levels. David's gaze, in turn, oscillates between disgust, pity and perhaps even love - and reflects the fatal relationship flicker between Ripley and Greenleaf. Didn't Marge only appear in the spotlight when her boyfriend Dickie finally disappeared?

Empathy with the murderer does not produce any of this, on the contrary. Caravaggio's chiaroscuro and cinematic black and white each stage in their own way: without light, the dark remains invisible, without beauty the ugliness remains undefined. In the series, Ripley embellishes her own inhumanity with accessories of sophistication that serve as objects of longing for the de-sensualized digital age. The fountain pen, the typewriter, the ashtray: crimes, their planning, execution and concealment are physical acts in the series. “Ripley” calls objects as witnesses. The price for this is lifelessness.

Italy without tourists

In view of the wet, shiny asphalt, picturesque peeling plaster and rusty iron, the series uninhibitedly indulges in retro aesthetics. Not to forget the Italian supporting actors: With their character heads, they seem as if they had just stepped over from the Neorealismo of the late 1940s to today's film sets - in holiday hotspots without tourists. Slowly, very slowly, exhaustingly slowly, “Ripley” unfolds its drama, psychologically not always convincing, acting shaky, aesthetically always at its best.

Is it worth the wait? One man without a doubt: John Malkovich. A baring of his teeth in the role of the self-proclaimed art dealer - a metafictional reference to another Highsmith film adaptation - and we have seen a true master of the portrayal of the abyssal. His smile only lasts seconds.'

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'All of Us Strangers( All of Us Strangers , in the original), gay romance starring Andrew Scott , the Priest from the Fleabag series (2016-2019), and Paul Mescal , nominated for an Oscar for Aftersun (2022), is available in the Star+ catalog, the platform of Disney, starting this Wednesday, April 24th.

All of Us Strangers tells the story of Adam ( Scott ), a 40-something screenwriter, who lives alone in an almost deserted skyscraper on the outskirts of London. One night, he is approached by one of his few neighbors, Harry ( Mescal ), who invites him to spend the night together, after noticing him watching him on a few occasions.

Insecure about issues in his own life, Adam rejects the boy's initial advances, but the drunken flirtation makes him decide to revisit the past. He returns to the house he lived in as a child and meets his parents, with whom he has deep conversations, which have been pending since their death in a tragic car accident.

All of Us Unknown is written and directed by Andrew Haigh , already known for the 2011 LGBTQIAPN+ dramas Weekend , and Looking , a series aired between 2014 and 2015, based on the supernatural novelStrangers , by Japanese writer Taichi Yamada .

In addition to Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal , the film also stars Jamie Bell , known for Billy Elliot (2000), King Kong (2005), Nymphomaniac (2013) and Fantastic Four (2015); and Claire Foy , who played Queen Elizabeth II in the early seasons of The Crown (2016-2023)...'

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Love this shoot!

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I have a sudden urge to listen to 1984 again...

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This is a great chat.

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Ripley (Steven Zaillian, 2024).

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I'll protect you from the hooded claw/Keep the vampires from your door

more versions under the cut!

i wanted to make paul mescal so real he climbs out of your computer screen so you can give him a hug

aaaa i love this movie!!! might actually be my favourite right now!!! just beautiful cinematography and like all the topics of loneliness and love and family and grief. paul mescal and andrew scott gave phenomenal performances.

all the colors and the warmth of film camera!! they achieved so many amazing shots. I especially loved this shot and any shot with reflections!!

i'm definitely doing an andrew scott piece next! just don't know which shot to use. give me your suggestions if you have them!

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sorry bro i lost focus and forgot where u begin and i end i hope nothing gay happened

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*feels* *emotional*

PAUL MESCAL & ANDREW SCOTT All of Us Strangers (2023) dir. Andrew Haigh — You're here. With me.

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ANDREW SCOTT & PAUL MESCAL Out Magazine Behind The Scenes

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🔥🔥🔥

ALL OF US STRANGERS (dir. Andrew Haigh, 2023)

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the funniest thing i’ve seen all day

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Know Your TikTok Trends with PAUL MESCAL · ANDREW SCOTT ↳ Searchlight Pictures Pressroom · 08.01.2024

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"Death of a Party" by Blur in All of Us Strangers (2023) dir. Andrew Haigh

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Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal THE GRAHAM NORTON SHOW — S31E14