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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Mickey 17 review – Robert Pattinson proves expendable in Bong Joon-ho’s eerily cheery cloning drama

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The Parasite director delivers an intriguing yet baffling sci-fi epic, featuring panto gnashing bad guys played by Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette

The Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho has delivered his first movie since the Oscar-winning Parasite six years ago, and it’s a great, big, slightly soft-edged sci-fi-fantasy. Adapted by Bong from Edward Ashton’s novel, it stars Robert Pattinson as a bio-clone menial worker of the future, condemned to eternal life, or eternal death, being repeatedly killed in the service of a space-exploration corporation, doing fatally dangerous jobs and then reincarnated.

It’s a broad-brush futurist satire on the theme of Elon Musk-type tech bros who say that whining about the environment is for libtards because we’re all shooting off for space really soon, where there have to be viable planets somewhere, and any current alien inhabitants are expendable — as indeed are the working humans who are getting us out to new worlds.

Mickey 17 is something in the style of his Snowpiercer (2013) or Okja (2017) and Bong’s “creature feature” reflex is an extravagant style that’s been enjoyable in the past. Mickey 17 is visually spectacular with some very sharp, angular moments of pathos and horror — maybe inevitably, these come in the first act when the bizarrely shocking premise is established and before the story grinds more sympathetically into gear. But at two hours and 17 minutes, this is a baggy and sometimes loose film whose narrative tendons are a bit slack sometimes; the goofy comedy with its panto-villain turns from Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette sometimes makes it look — not unpleasantly, in fact — like a kids TV special.

Pattinson himself plays Mickey Barnes, a hapless loser who owes money to a terrifying loan sharks, along with his equally rackety business partner Timo (Steven Yeun). To escape these goons, Mickey and Timo sign on for a dangerous interplanetary expedition masterminded by a creepy populist-plutocrat with shiny teeth and slicked-back hair: Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo) and his lady wife Ylfa (Toni Collette); their presence reminds us of Bong’s apparent interest in Roald Dahl.

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