How do you honestly react to THE SUBSTANCE without using expletives? The commentary on sexualised imagery and aging isn’t subtle, but Coralie Fargeat’s body horror is powerful, cinematic and by turns nauseating and uncomfortably hilarious. Movie star-turned-TV fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, sensational) is deemed past her prime when she turns 50 and so begins taking “The Substance” in secret, growing a younger, sexier and more marketable version of herself out of her back to revitalise her career. But Liz and Sue (Margaret Qualley, hypnotic) must share one life and when the latter begins to take over at expense of her original host, a horrific chain of events are set in motion. Moore and Qualley seamlessly play two vastly different aspects of the same personality navigating a world that is heightened almost to cartoonish extremes but no less hard-hitting or satirically pointed because of it. You might find it difficult to shift some of the screwed-up imagery from this for a while. SSP
Review in Brief: The Substance (2024)
Tangerine (2015) Review
The Three Musketeers: Parts I & II (2023)
In over a century of cinema it’s strange to realise just how few French adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’ THE THREE MUSKETEERS there have been. This version from director Martin Bourboulon is probably the best of any version since the silent era, staying faithful to the elements that matter but modernising other aspects to excite contemporary audiences. Seeking to join the king’s musketeers, D’Artagnan (François Civil) instead ends up fighting three of them before allying and helping to stop an elaborate plot against the French crown. With its punchy action, rich and lived-in production design and engaging performances from the likes of Eva Green as Milady and Vincent Cassel as Athos, this is a thrilling two-part swashbuckler that makes you long for more variety in Hollywood action adventure films and respect but not slavishness in adapting the classics. SSP
SSP Thinks Film 