The Blood Countess review – Isabelle Huppert reigns supreme in a surreal vampire fantasia

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Vienna turns into a playground of camp, cruelty and aristocratic disdain in a blackly comic take on the Báthory legend – with Huppert gloriously suited to the title role From the dark heart of central Europe comes a midnight-movie romp through the moonlit urban glades of Euro-goth and camp from German director Ulrike Ottinger. As for the star … well, it’s the part she was born to play. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, legendary for having the blood of hundreds of young girls on her hands and indeed her body, in an attempt to attain eternal youth. The “blood countess” has been variously played in the past by Ingrid Pitt, Delphine Seyrig, Paloma Picasso, Julie Delpy and many more, but surely none were as qualified as Huppert who importantly does not modify her habitual hauteur one iota for the role. Her natural aristocratic mien and cool hint of elegant contempt were never so well matched with a part. She gives us the ...
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The Integrity of Joseph Chambers review – tense parable of troubled masculinity

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A city slicker moves his family to Alabama in search of a wholesome life and sets off for a solo hunting trip. It’s not going to go well

Robert Machoian is an indie film-maker drawn to a certain type of troubled American masculinity: the type that’s never so toxic as when weak or insecure. His previous drama The Killing of Two Lovers was about male anger, and this tense, suspenseful new film has similar ideas: a Dostoevskian parable set over a single day in remote woodland, with a slow-moving simplicity that belies its storytelling ingenuity and force, and again featuring Machoian’s longtime collaborator, actor-producer Clayne Crawford. This actually looks as if it could have been conceived in the 1970s, with a hint of Boorman’s Deliverance: right down to the Burt Reynolds moustache that the male lead smugly sculpts for himself one morning in front of the shaving mirror, to his wife’s annoyance.

Crawford plays Joseph Chambers, a prosperous insurance salesman and Christian family man who has moved to rural Alabama with his wife Tess (Jordana Brewster) and their two boys, to find a more wholesome place away from the city for the children’s upbringing. But Joseph has got it into his head to have a day’s hunting on his own in some nearby woodland belonging to his friend Doug (Carl Kennedy), to learn some survival skills and generally prove his manhood. Tess, who grew up with a dad and brothers who hunted, and actually knows more about this kind of stuff than her naive city-slicker husband, is dead against him going on his own like this.

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