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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Mission Alarum review – dreadful Sylvester Stallone spy thriller shames cinema itself

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Donald Trump’s ‘special ambassador to Hollywood’ plays a grizzled agent in this dismal action movie

Back at the beginning of the second Trump administration (which feels like the Jurassic era now), the president named Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight “special ambassadors to a great but troubled place, Hollywood, California.” No one seems to be quite sure what these ambassadorships entail or if any of that troika of right-wing fellow travellers have fulfilled any official duties. But on the evidence of this, Stallone is already letting the side down – by making a film so bad it shames American cinema itself. And it wasn’t even made in Hollywood! Instead, it was shot in Ohio (pretending, deeply unconvincingly, to be Poland), making this what’s called a runaway production, the phenomenon that is undermining Hollywood’s film-making industry.

However, this cheapola would-be spy thriller is bad all on its own, whatever its politics. The idea is that secret agents Joe (Scott Eastwood) and his supposed antagonist Lara (Willa Fitzgerald) meet-cute in Prague (the real thing, shown in what looks suspiciously like stock aerial footage) while trying to kill each other, but instead they fall in love and get married. Five years later, Joe has seemingly retired from the spy business, but Lara is still working for an independent, territorially unattached agency called Alarum who supply her with what looks like a fancy pager to communicate with headquarters.

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