Diane Kruger

The Shrouds

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Becca moulders in her coffin

The Shrouds looks like the filmic equivalent of David Bowie’s final album, Dark Star, a requiem revisiting old ideas in an up-to-the-minute way. David Cronenberg has not announced that he is dying. But aren’t we all? All the time? It’s the sort of thing Cronenberg has been saying, with a macabre chuckle, since he first announced himself with Shivers 50 years ago. Cronenberg’s own wife died in 2017 and it would be crass to suggest that The Shrouds is really all about that. But let’s be crass for a minute and point out that Vincent Cassel, who plays this film’s dubious hero, has hair like Cronenberg’s. His character dresses like him and works … Read more

Marlowe

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Diane Kruger and Liam Neeson

Warmed-over Raymond Chandler isn’t quite the same as hard-boiled Raymond Chandler, but that’s what’s on offer in Marlowe, a strange misfire that looks like it wanted to make a high-concept colourised simulacrum of a darkly noirish 1940s-style thriller and then settled instead for bloodless pastiche. It’s second order stuff all the way, from Xavi Gimenéz’s deliberately un-cinematic, almost Hallmark TV cinematography, to screenplay writer William Monahan’s flat adaptation of John Banville’s novel, itself a simulacrum of Raymond Chandler’s style. David Holmes’s non-committal (bewildered?) soundtrack kind of says it all. It’s all set in 1939, where ex-cop-now-gumshoe Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is visited by a rich, breathy, libidinous blonde (Diane Kruger) who wants him to … Read more