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

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 ...

All That’s Left of You review – deeply moving epic of Palestinian intergenerational trauma

Sundance film festival: Cherien Dabis’s drama, spanning nearly 75 years in one Palestinian family, is a heart-wrenching, if sometimes blunt, portrait of displacement

All That’s Left of You, Palestinian American film-maker Cherien Dabis’s wrenching portrait of intergenerational trauma, begins its 75-year tale of displacement as the great epics do, in medias res.

A teenage boy chases a friend through the narrow streets of Nablus, a blur of surefooted youth amid the sun-bleached, nobly dilapidated homes. In a series of kinetic, precise shots, Dabis sketches a vibrant map of the occupied West Bank in the late 80s, where humiliation and hope coexist in a dangerous pressure cooker. Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) bounds from an auntie’s kitchen to a bustling fruit market to a protest against Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint; he summarily joins the chant of intifada (“uprising”). Then, the soldiers open fire.

All That’s Left of You is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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