Margaret Qualley

The Substance

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Young Judith in gym gear in front of a picture of Old Judith

Youth is wasted on the young in The Substance, writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s long, exciting and technically brilliant sci-fi fable swaggering like a 1980s action movie. Demi Moore plays Judith Sparkle, the ageing actress who takes “the substance” after being nudged in the direction of the age-reversing serum by a doctor with too-blue eyes, too-tight skin and too-perfect hair. With a wave of a magic syringe she has soon budded, allowing a younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) to go out and play in Hollywood, leaving the aged and inert husk back at the ranch. The wrinkle is that it’s a week on, a week off. Every seven days Young Judith has … Read more

Drive-Away Dolls

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Jamie and Marian realise they're couriers of the wrong sort of merchandise

Drive-Away Dolls is the first feature film that Ethan Coen has directed without brother Joel’s involvement at some stage. Playing it safe, he’s decided to go for a homage to the films he first made with Joel back in those Blood Simple/Raising Arizona years. While this isn’t a bad thing in itself, it does mean what’s on offer is familiar – fruits, nuts and flakes, pantomime death, cartoonish visuals, a lot of the verbals, low shots down corridors, villains falling out with each other and what have you. It’s, you know, OK, though neither Blood Simple nor Raising Arizona need worry and it raises again a question that’s always hovered in my mind, as … Read more

Stars at Noon

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Daniel and Trish

Once upon a time Claire Denis didn’t make genre movies. She made film you might designate broadly as dramas, or as French dramas, but most specifically as Claire Denis movies, films often with a strong emphasis on unspoken attraction (see Beau Travail, her masterpiece). But in recent years that has changed. In films like Bastards, a Get Carter-style crime drama, or High Life, a densely imagined piece of sci-fi, or Let the Sun Shine In, an ironic romance, Denis has shown she’s happy to make genre movies, as long as it’s on her terms. Which brings us to Stars at Noon, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in a shady Central American country run … Read more