La Gradiva Arrives: France Lost, NYFF Won

Marine Atlan made her feature debut and walked away from Cannes Critics' Week with the AMI Paris Grand Prize. That's not a minor footnote — that's the kind of origin story that precedes a career you'll spend the next decade tracking. *La Gradiva* arrives at the New York Film Festival having already done the festival circuit in a way that feels less like a press tour and more like a slow accumulation of believers, and the trailer confirms what Cannes already decided: this is a coming-of-age film that doesn't bother apologising for being one.

France passed on submitting it for the International Feature Film Oscar race, which is the kind of institutional miscalculation that becomes legendary in hindsight. The film will collect critics' prizes in America instead, and the people who voted against it will quietly not mention it.

Meanwhile, the Rosalind Franklin industrial complex continues its expansion. Natalie Portman is playing her in film. Nicole Kidman did it on stage. Now the groundbreaking British scientist — whose work on DNA was essential and whose credit was extracted from her without ceremony — is getting a television series developed by her own great-niece alongside *Outer Banks* director Valerie Weiss. There is something appropriate about Franklin's story requiring three separate formats to contain it. One film was never going to be enough for a woman who was owed that much.

And then there is *A Talent for Murder*, Anton Corbijn directing Helen Mirren and Alden Ehrenreich through a Patricia Highsmith thriller, and if that sentence doesn't make you want to clear your evening then I don't know what to tell you. Corbijn made *Control* and *The American* — he understands that tension lives in stillness, that menace is better when it's quiet. Highsmith is the perfect source material for a director who doesn't need to raise his voice. Mirren and Ehrenreich in opposition is the kind of pairing that either becomes iconic or becomes a case study in wasted potential, and nothing about this suggests the latter.

Three very different films. One thread: women who are underestimated by the institutions around them, and one thriller about what happens when the wrong person gets too close.

The verdict on *La Gradiva* is already written. The rest of us are just catching up.