sissy spacek

Die My Love

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Grace and Jackson in the car

I’m amazed at how many of “the best films of 2025” have left me pretty cold. Die My Love joins the list alongside the likes of Sinners, The Mastermind and Bugonia – everyone loves them, but I thought they were just OK. I did like Die My Love, though, particularly the florid performance by Jennifer Lawrence as a woman losing her mind in a severe case of post-partum depression. Possibly. It’s never entirely spelled out, but then that’s often the case with diagnosing the baby blues too. It’s a one-woman show offering co-star billing but not oodles to do to Robert Pattinson, who plays Jackson, the partner of Grace (Lawrence), who has brought … Read more

3 Women

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Millie and Pinkie

3 Women, or Robert Altman’s 3 Women as the screen title has it, is Altman’s attempt to go one better than Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which was a peculiar story about two women whose identities become melded, switched, lumped together. Bergman did it as sci-fi, of sorts, whereas Altman’s crack at the same idea leans harder on horror. It’s Gerald Busby’s relentlessly spiky and spooky score that most obviously alerts us that this is a horror movie, again of sorts. Though this is an almost relentlessly bright and clean movie, here and there Altman reminds us what he’s about with temporary dives into gothic Hammer-style visuals. Sissy Spacek plays the naive young blow-in from … Read more

Deadfall

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Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde in Deadfall

Remember Eric Bana in Chopper, frightening everyone to death as Australia’s most gruesomely violent criminal, Mark “Chopper” Read? There are echoes of Bana the Bad in Deadfall, in which he plays one half of a psycho sibling pair who are heading, unwittingly as far as they and everyone else concerned can tell, for a showdown rendezvous at a Thanksgiving dinner. Deadfall isn’t half as good as Chopper, though it does give Bana a chance to show us he can still do ugly. If only writer Zach Dean and director Stefan Ruzowitzky had worked out some way of telling the other four stories they’re trying to tell with economy, leaving Bana with more screen … Read more