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 ...

‘I think my mum’s going to like it’: Alexander Skarsgård on his gay biker ‘dom-com’ Pillion

In May, Cannes went weak at the knees for Harry Lighton’s tale of BDSM and bootlicking in suburbia. Ahead of its release, the director and his stars reveal the explicit shots snipped from the final cut and discuss why Pride has become too sanitised

Harry Melling knows the secret to being a good boot-licker. “You want to give a decent, satisfying, sexy lick,” says the 36-year-old actor, who has the umlaut eyes and nasal tones of Nicholas Lyndhurst. “Once you get to the toe-cap, you need to make sure they can really feel your tongue through the leather.”

Melling, barely recognisable from his childhood role as wretched Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, learned this new skill while preparing for the award-winning BDSM romcom Pillion. He plays Colin, a timid traffic warden who becomes the willing submissive to a taciturn biker named Ray. Listening intently to Melling’s boot-licking tips in this London hotel room are his Pillion partners-in-kink: Harry Lighton, the film’s 33-year-old writer-director, whose flat cap and smirk lend him a roguish look, and Alexander Skarsgård, 49, who plays Ray, and is dressed today in a slobby ensemble – red sweatshirt, blue tracksuit bottoms, black shoes – that fails to spoil his pin-up prettiness.

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