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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Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere review – solid biopic both embraces and avoids cliche

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New York film festival: Jeremy Allen White is a convincingly tortured rock star in this smartly narrow and specific look at a particular chapter of music history

The genre of the musical biopic is one that, as Timothée Chalamet acknowledged while accepting a Sag award for playing Bob Dylan earlier this year, “could be perhaps tired”. The beats of the genre – the initial obstacles, the double-edged sword of success, the actors’ pursuit of industry awards for spirited impersonation – are by now so familiar that you’re almost expected to enter with more than a bit of skepticism, even when the artist at hand is one as widely beloved as Bruce Springsteen.

Like A Complete Unknown, in which Chalamet portrayed Dylan from 1961 until his pivot to electric in 1965, Deliver Me from Nowhere, Springsteen’s authorized biopic starring Jeremy Allen White, tries to thread a difficult needle between offering the standard treats and subverting expectations, between narrativizing genius and resisting hagiography. This may be an impossible task, given that the magic and cliches of popular music often go hand in hand, and Deliver Me from Nowhere certainly has its spoof-worthy moments. I went in braced for success montages, leaden flashbacks and capital-R Realizations, and at times met them. (Though to be clear, the expected treat of watching White, of the Bear and Calvin Klein underwear ad fame, tear up the stage as The Boss is still exactly that.) But more often I was won over by its diversions in form – its specificities, its smallness and its portrait of mental fragility.

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