IGN - "It looks beautiful, with photography and production design – overseen by Yorick Le Saux and Marco Bittner respectively – combining to create darkly luscious and frequently hypnotic images that bring the strange world of Adam and Eve to life, most notably when the camera is looking down upon them from high during the film's beautiful slow-motion interludes... Swinton and Hiddleston certainly look the part as the strung-out couple, her cheekbones all feline grace, he – dressed head-to-toe in black – every inch the Byronic anti-hero. But where Eve is filled with the joys of the after-life, Adam is a bit of a 'Debbie Downer', his depression allowing Hiddleston to deliver several amusingly deadpan digs..."
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The Scotsman - "Jim Jarmusch’s sepulchral romance seems to have been designed to accommodate both those who love the genre and those who can’t face another bite, by making a movie which acknowledges some of the bloodsuckers’ favourite touchstones whilst pondering what eternal love really means in the undead community... Fans of sharp teeth may be a little disappointed that Jarmusch’s bloodsuckers don’t do much neckbiting in this film. However, unlike the vegetarian vampires of "Twilight", this isn’t because of any great sense of compassion for humans, but because humans are so polluted nowadays that it is safer to bribe a doctor to slip you sachets from a blood bank, or tap Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) for his supply of "the good stuff"..."
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The Arts Desk - "Unique, dreamy, super cool and splendidly silly, just like its maker Jim Jarmusch, 'Only Lovers Left Alive' is a vampire flick packed full of romanticism, wit and enchanting, fuzzy music. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are perfectly cast as a pair of vampires named Adam and Eve entangled for eternity by the bonds of love. They don't prowl around town searching for victims, instead they live peaceful existences surrounded by the “human zombies” who are slowly ruining their beloved planet... Fans of Jarmusch should be excited as this is one of his best to date, thanks to his spot-on insertion of the hippy zeitgeist into the souls of two wise lovers as they ponder and philosophise regarding their fears and the thrills of the modern world..."
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Digital Spy - "One of cinema's most defiant rebels jumps on the vampire bandwagon, but never fear: he hasn't gone all the way to the dark side. Writer/director Jim Jarmusch casts Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as the bloodsuckers trying to fill their time after so many centuries, like a couple of urban slackers doomed to faff for eternity... Hiddleston is brilliant. He pulls off a delicate balancing act, never tipping too far into sulky self-indulgence and Swinton is a reliable anchor with her no-nonsense approach to immortal life. It seems an unlikely pairing and yet they have a great rapport, both able to tap into an unconventional vein of humour... Adam may continue to ponder the big question, but Jarmusch makes a very strong argument for Eve's philosophy of life. He delivers two hours of pure, unadulterated pleasure; a fiendishly amusing, high-spirited movie that simply bleeds with cool..."
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Move over, Dracula. Vampires don’t have to be just old dudes in capes anymore, or even dudes at all. If there was a glass ceiling in vampiredom, women have definitely bitten through it — as is apparent from the new movie Vampire Academy. Based on Richelle Mead’s young-adult series of horror-fantasy novels, the film is a girl-powered visit to a boarding school for young women who are either vampires or the half-vamp/half-human bodyguards who protect them.
Of course, female vampires have been part of vampire movie lore for ages, but it’s only recently that they’ve gotten equal time with the guys. Thanks to authors like Mead and Twilight‘s Stephenie Meyer (and Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris before them), the vampire world is largely co-ed now, in books and TV (True Blood, Vampire Diaries) as well as movies.
Whether this represents a triumph or setback for feminism is a question we’ll leave to academics and Buffy fans. Still, a lot of girls and women had to bite a lot of necks for today’s female vampires to achieve such prominence. Here’s a look back at some of the parasitic pioneers whose big-screen bloodlust blazed a trail for the current crop of fang-bearing femmes.
CLAUDIA (INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE)
Kirsten Dunst became a star at age 12 with her performance in the movie version of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire as Claudia, a little girl saved from the brink of death by vampires Louis (Brad Pitt) and Lestat (Tom Cruise), but also damned to an existence as a vampire. At first, she and her surrogate dads form a perverse parody of a family, one that feeds on the help (Claudia’s casual, ravenous cruelty is played for laughs). But black comedy turns to horror in the sequence where Claudia tries in vain to cut her hair and realizes that she’ll always be stuck in a child’s body
Even so, as the body count racks up, Claudia remains sympathetic by ultimately siding with the conscience-stricken Louie over the remorseless Lestat. Give credit to Dunst for making her sympathetic enough that it’s actually heartbreaking when she’s forced to meet her sun-charred doom.
ELI (LET THE RIGHT ONE IN)
Eli (Lina Leandersson), of the Swedish hit Let the Right One In, is another vampire who gains sympathy just by being a little girl. At first, she even seems like a good friend to a fellow outcast child, the bullied boy Oskar (Kare Hedebrant). But of course, she’s as deadly as any other vampire. Plus, she keeps a mortal, full-grown man, Hakan, in her thrall to serve her bloodthirsty needs, and he’ll go to any self-sacrificing length to do so.
The bond between Oskar and Eli is both sweet and horrifying. (Watch the scene where she shows Oskar how much she trusts him by demonstrating the gruesome consequences for a vampire who tries to enter a dwelling without permission.) She helps him find strength, but with lethal results that indicate she’s grooming him to become the next Hakan, and probably not the last. Chloe Grace Moretz did a decent job with the same role in the American version, Let Me In, but for a performance of truly deep sorrow and creepiness, stick with the Swedish original.
VICTORIA (THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE)
There are plenty of female vampires to choose from in the Twilight saga, from the nice gals in the Cullen clan to the nasty ones in the Volturi, the vampire ruling body. But the one to be reckoned with is Victoria, the flame-haired vamp who spends the first three movies hunting down the Cullens and their new human pal Bella (Kristen Stewart). Evading both the vampires of Team Edward and the werewolves of Team Jacob, she sprints and leaps through the forests of the Pacific Northwest with feral, feline grace. She’s also charismatic enough to lead a stampeding army of strong, wild, newly-made vampires.
We liked Rachelle Lefevre as the initial Victoria, as her ethereal appearance made her look especially otherworldly and beyond human. When a scheduling conflict led producers to replace her with Bryce Dallas Howard in the third film, we were skeptical, but Howard was suitably scary. Maybe not as scary as Howard was in The Help, but then, no one made Victoria eat a pie made of excrement, either.
SELENE (UNDERWORLD)
After a decade or so of B-list roles, Kate Beckinsale rose to leading lady status with the Underworld series in 2003. Looking sleek in a black leather body suit, her Selene didn’t do a whole lot of biting or bloodsucking, but she did a fair amount of gunslinging, firing fusillades of silver bullets in the wars between vampires and werewolves.
Okay, she was basically a centuries-old version of Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity from The Matrix, but despite the occasional love interest, she was pretty independent, a renegade to both camps. Horror and action fans alike were smitten; so was director Len Wiseman, who married Beckinsale after the first of the four Underworld films.
AKASHA (QUEEN OF THE DAMNED)
Now that’s what a vampire queen is supposed to look like. In the 2002 adaptation of vampire maven Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned, R&B star Aaliyah looks thoroughly exotic, dangerous, and depraved. It’s sad to say, but the fact that Aaliyah died (in a plane crash, at the far too young age of 22) a year before the movie’s release only added to her character’s eerie, beyond-the-grave appeal.
In the film, Akasha is the first vampire, long dormant but awakened twice by the music of the vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend), now frontman of a popular metal band. She and Lestat become lovers, but her seemingly indiscriminate willingness to kill any human or vampire that stands in her way is too much even for Lestat. The whole thing is pretty silly, but there’s no denying Aaliyah’s charismatic screen presence.
SOURCES ( UN ) ( DEUX ) ( TROIS ) ( QUATRE ) et ( CINQ )
A friendly reminder that "Only Lovers Left Alive" opens on February 21 in the UK and on April 11 in the US.
Also, I am Team Eve because of obvious reasons. So who's your favorite female movie vampire, ONTD?