Creak, ectoplasm swirls, and wind whistles through crumbling mansions in Personal Shopper (Icon, 15); however, Olivier Assayas’s sharp, glassy ghost story isn’t any unfashionable Victorian rehash. This story of grief taking either uncanny or deliriously illusory form amid the on-foot ciphers of Paris’s movie star set is pretty much the most modern imaginative and prescient of a phantom risk in the latest memory – one which sees even a device as soulless because the iPhone become a capability conduit of religious presence.
As bespoke style buyer Maureen (Kristen Stewart) tries to blankly hold her lifestyle of 2nd-hand privilege in the wake of her dual brother Lewis’s demise, unsure apparitions interfere with shaking her out her waking to sleepwalk. Is it Lewis? Someone or something else? Or, as she enters eerie text-message exchanges with an invisible stalker, is the call surely coming from inside her head? Assayas thrillingly maintains all alternatives open, directing what looks as if schlock with the silken precision that steadily uncovers a messy tangle of emotional threads. As for Stewart, at the same time as wholly unconvincing as a person named Maureen, she’s in any other case coolly remarkable, shuffling terror, preference, and disaffection with an unmarried hand from to scene.
Marion Cotillard makes rare errors of judgment in Nicole Garcia’s dozy, heavily cologned melodrama. It’s rare for a film to bounce from UK cinemas to Netflix earlier than heading to DVD. Had I observed it turned into streaming, I’d have urged you to catch Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s superb Aquarius (Arrow, 18) weeks ago. Now, with this heady cinematic Caipirinha of social, sexual, and political unrest available on all formats, you’ve no excuse to pass it. No overall performance in the final 12 months was given less of its due than Sônia Braga’s sensuous but razor-edged profession-crowner here. As a boho widow fighting teeth and nails to keep her otherwise emptied Recife rental construction from corrupt asset builders, she’s as hard and funny as attractive as autumn technology, Bette Davis – whose philosophy that “vintage age ain’t no vicinity for sissies” receives a rigorous exercise in Mendonça Filho’s unfastened-flowing, however livid movie.
‘Entirely superb’: Aquarius, starring the great Sônia Braga.
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‘Entirely first-rate’: Aquarius, starring the great Sônia Braga. Photograph: Alamy
Aquarius is a greater rousing examination of feminist independence than Disney’s blockbusting self-remake Beauty and the Beast (Disney, PG) – the millennial embellishments of which have been lots vaunted in advance, however, mark a timid departure at great from the fairy tale method. As expensively upholstered as it may be, Bill Condon’s film is a lavishly designed cosplay exercise, an artificial tribute to the utterly updated charms of the landmark 1991 animation that invents no virtues. Even that glorious Ashman-Menken tune rating is rendered thinner and tinier right here, and no longer simply by using a hard-running Emma Watson’s reedy vocals: the entire movie is little more than capable karaoke. Still, it’s without difficulty the highest-grossing movie of the 12 months, so what do I understand?
In the meantime, I fell out of step with my important peers on Terence Davies’s embalmed, parasol-twirling Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion (Thunderbird, 12). Davies, a proficient filmmaker who wears his melancholic sensitivities on his sleeve, must wear an excellent soulmate for Dickinson’s yearning, internalized artistry. Still, this Valentine is scuppered with its tone-deaf dabbling in an arch, overworked comedy of the faux-Austen faculty. It belatedly corrects the route toward plummeting heartbreak, but an unpoetic stiffness persists.
It’s a Quiet Passion trailer.
As you can see, it’s a gratifyingly generous week for lady-driven dramas, if not exactly a type one. Another lady suffers from steely clear up with The Levelling (Peccadillo, 15), an unwelcoming, however auspicious debut from British newcomer Hope Dickson Leach that treads a few acquainted – and squidgily rain-sodden – turf with its rumbling tale of a younger trainee vet (Ellie Kendrick) returning to her father’s sick farm after her brother’s loss of life. Unlike Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper, she isn’t haunted with the aid of her sibling. However, something’s off all of the identical. Dickson Leach bridges rural realism with a streak of classical tragedy.
Weepier and now not half of as formidable is Another Mother’s Son (Signature, 12), a 2nd world struggle story of doughty home-the front pluck, fronted by Jenny Seagrove, that might have been dredged up at any factor within the past 70 years. Marion Cotillard, meanwhile, makes unprecedented errors of judgment in Nicole Garcia’s dozy, closely cologned melodrama From the Land of the Moon (StudioCanal, 15). Playing a spirited French villager forced right into a loveless marriage to break out being sectioned; she emotes with all she’s got. However, it can’t raise this even to a crazy-delight reputation.
Netflix’s To the Bone, starring Lily Collins.
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‘Empathetic’: Netflix’s To the Bone, starring Lily Collins. Photograph: Gilles Mingasson/Netflix through AP
Back to Netflix, wherein their contemporary Sundance-premiered exclusive To the Bone is hardly more a laugh to observe; however, it winds up rattling you internally. An unfussy, emotionally acute directorial debut for veteran Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer Marti Noxon, it tackles the awful concern of teen anorexia with an empathetic directness that dodges any maudlin disorder-of-the-week pitfalls and showcases new, nervy complexities infamous person, Lily Collins – as a wasted-away patient on her closing treatment, and a final shred of wish. For a younger audience, it’s the thoughtful, immediately-up deal with this subject that is too lengthy needed on film.
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