Thursday, March 13, 2025

Opus desperately wants to be a part of the moment. It has the look: the hard lines and clinical wide shots – Stanley Kubrick as a viral aesthetic – that have dominated high-concept horror of late, especially any fellow productions acquired by distributor A24. It's how last month's Companion was styled, and Zoë Kravitz's Blink Twice before it. It has the star: Ayo Edebiri, whose relatable nonchalance on the comedy-drama series The Bear and goofy, yet sardonic humour off camera have made her one of the hottest rising stars of late. And it has the "salient themes": celebrity worship, the media, the rise in cult-like behaviours. But this is all superficial stuff. There's not much about Opus, really, that fully convinces.

Edebiri, with that same relatable nonchalance, plays Ariel, an overlooked Gen Z writer at a music magazine, whose ideas are appropriated by her editor Stan (The Last of Us and The White Lotus's Murray Bartlett), and passed off to white, male writers. Opportunity knocks when she unexpectedly receives an invite, alongside Stan, to the remote compound of pop star Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich), the "Wizard of Wiggle" who delivered a string of No 1 singles in the previous century and then practically evaporated off the face of the planet.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

Steven Soderbergh returns for the second time this year with the sexily efficient Black Bag (*****), while celebrity cult-based horror Opus (**) seems a little familiar.

Meanwhile, The Rule of Jenny Pen (**), struggles to hit the right grim-funny tone in its (male!) hagsploitation tale set in a care facility, while documentary Dawn of Impressionism: Paris 1874 brings the birth of modern art to life, and Karan Kandhari's debut Sister Midnight (****) takes an unexpected turn into monstrous territory with its funny, caustic, Jarmuschian tale of a woman liberating herself from an arranged marraige. 

And, finally, Kieran Culkin's Oscar-winning performance in A Real Pain (****) gets its home entertainment release. 

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

Efficiency isn't meant to feel this thrillingly erotic. But that's how love goes in Black Bag, an ode to a poisonously compatible marriage between spies, in which lies are the daggers slipped under a lover's pillow each night. Airtight efficiency is also precisely how Steven Soderbergh's thriller operates. It starts the moment its plot kicks into gear and never looks back.

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) weaves through a London club. He meets his colleague, who tells him there's a mole in the agency. One of the suspects is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). And off we go! Black Bag, like Soderbergh's previous effort (Presence, released just over a month ago), is scripted by David Koepp. If that last film, a lo-fi POV horror, offered the most pleasurable demonstrations of craft seen so far this year, then Black Bag cranks that pleasure up several notches.

It's lean to the bone, moving swiftly into an extended dinner party sequence built like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? if several of its participants had committed war crimes, only to circle back to the same location later on, as if it were a prowling leopard. Insults here are exquisite little bonbons – "a perversion of what a man should be" is rebutted with "you're a diseased creature" – and the dramatic twists are unexpected, yet never overstretched.

Everyone's a sociopath, from Tom Burke's lecherously cantankerous Freddie Smalls to Marisa Abela's Clarissa Dubose, who adds to her Industry character's haughtiness a sexual kink for polygraph tests. Regé-Jean Page is the maliciously blasé, Call of Duty-obsessed Colonel James Stokes, and Pierce Brosnan's top dog Arthur Stieglitz breezes through every scene with a Machiavellian cocked eyebrow. Naomie Harris's on-site psychiatrist, Dr Zoe Vaughan, at first seems moderately well-balanced, but she, like everybody else, is compromised by the malevolent vehicle that is international espionage. The keys to tomorrow are in the hands of people who view the soul as the weakest part of the body.

Read the full review here. 

A document of where I've gone and the things I've seen 

Saturday, 8 March
After watching a decent amount of Sean Evans's Hot Ones interviews, in which celebrities are tasked with trying a series hot sauces ascending up the Scoville scale, I finally had the opportunity at a friend's party to try the infamous final boss, Da Bomb. I think I did alright. Around the Elizabeth Olsen level of composure. 

Monday, 1o March 

Sipped a negroni and settled in for A24-distributed horror Opus at its London press screening. 

Tuesday, 11 March  

I attended the UK special screening of Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag, with its stylishly attired cast in attendance. I was impressed at how many in the audience had turned up in turtlenecks and blazers. Soderbergh's magic at work!

Steven Soderbergh and his cast at the UK special screening of 'Black Bag' 

There are very few men in Mirror Mirror (1990). This is a woman's horror, directed by a woman (Marina Sargenti), and written by women (sisters Annette and Gina Cascone), in which the monster that haunts its heroes are the insidious voices that emerge from a full-length, antique mirror. Megan Gordon (Rainbow Harvest, dressed here to look identical to Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice, save for an edgy blonde undercut on one side) has relocated from Los Angeles, the city of superficiality, to a small town at the behest of her mother, Susan (Karen Black).

The patriarch has died. Both women have retreated into their petrified concepts of identity, the goth daughter and yuppy mom. "You don't know who the real you is and neither do I," Megan wails. At school, she's bullied by mean girl Charleen (Charlie Spradling). But the mirror in her bedroom, a leftover from the home's previous resident (there's talk of witchcraft, of course), whispers promises. Revenge. Desire. Power.

Mirror Mirror, one of the many direct-to-video releases of the early nineties, is undeniably derivative. At one point, Charleen jokes "It's not like we're gonna cover her in pig's blood or anything," in deference to Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976). But, still, Sargenti lands on some striking images that speak to the corruptive force of vanity, insecurity, and a desperation to conform.

Megan is seduced by the maybe of what she could be, in a scene in which she literally caresses and kisses her own reflection. Its set her on a path that could literally be called, "de-gothification", but speaks more acutely to a loss of self. What are women allowed to be beyond the lipstick, permed hair, and puff-sleeved jackets? Mirror Mirror's surprisingly dour conclusion suggests the mirror's hold on us might be near-impossible to defeat.

Mirror Mirror comes to Arrow's streaming service on 14 March.

Oscar Isaac poses for a photocall for the film The Nativity Story at Hotel De Russie November 24, 2006 in Rome, Italy.

(Photo Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images)

StudioCanal will release Waris Hussein's A Touch of Love (1969), featuring Sandy Dennis and Sir Ian McKellen in his first significant film role, on Blu-Ray, DVD and Digital from 17 March.

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