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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Jay Kelly review – even a George Clooney sizzle reel can’t save this dire Noah Baumbach effort

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Venice film festival
The affable star plays an affable star assessing his life and career at a Tuscan film festival in a wildly sentimental and self-indulgent piece of cine-narcissism

Everybody loves George Clooney, and rightly so. His performances in films such as Michael Clayton, Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven have been a joy, and as an elegant public figure he has more or less single-handedly underwritten the continuing currency of Hollywood classiness. But in this dire, sentimental and self-indulgent film, he has the look of a man who has found strychnine in his Nespresso pod and can’t remember which of the cupboards in his luxury hotel suite contains the antidote.

It is directed by Noah Baumbach, whose 2022 film White Noise, based on the Don DeLillo novel, was a superb competition entry at Venice. (Baumbach was reportedly disconcerted by a tepid response; I thought it was brilliant.) But this one is a grisly, sucrose, sub-Fellini swoon on the subject of a super-handsome Hollywood actor attending a Italian arts festival to accept a lifetime achievement award, and naturally experiencing endless bittersweet flashbacks to his youth, in which the middle aged Jay Kelly looks on, with that knowing Clooney smile.

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