Elisabeth Moss

Shell

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Zoe Shannon with her arms around Samantha Lake

First The Substance, now Shell – is there room for more body horror about the perils of staving off the ageing process? Shell attacks the same subject from the same angle but uses different implements. The result is less Cronenberg-inspired, as Coralie Forgeat’s The Substance was, more Paul Verhoeven, a cautionary tale with a leer and yuks. Director Max Minghella signals he has Verhoeven in mind in his very first shot – of Elizabeth Berkley in a bath trying to hack black lumps off her leg. She was the star of Verhoeven’s infamous Showgirls, a film that all but ruined her career and didn’t do anything for his – two barrels of old-fashioned, … Read more

Shirley

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Shirley and Rose talking

Shirley is your madwoman’s breakfast, a seething mass of dramatic tropes held together by a distinctly 1940s Freudian thriller atmosphere and populated by characters from a hall of mirrors. Elisabeth Moss plays real-life novelist Shirley Jackson (even Moss is cagey about how close her Shirley is to the original), the febrile, blunt-speaking, possibly clairvoyant novelist living on campus with her bumptious professor husband Stanley, played at full dervish by the ever-superb Michael Stuhlbarg. Into their lives come young lecturer Fred (Logan Lerman in another vanilla male role) and his wide-eyed newly pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young, the actual focus of the film), just for a day or so while the new arrivals get … Read more