Odd Dahmer biopic lacks killer punch...
Jeffrey Dahmer was an American serial killer who was given 15 life sentences when he was jailed in 1992, only to be beaten to death two years later by a fellow inmate. My Friend Dahmer (15) ★★★is the story of his high-school years, years blighted apparently by his mentally ill mother, a love of the macabre (he loved dissolving roadkill in acid) and his inability to make friends at school.
Even when he does become part of a gang – he discovers he can make his classmates laugh by pretending to be mentally handicapped – it’s never quite clear whether his new friends are laughing with him or at him.
Ross Lynch adopts a stoop-shouldered shuffle to play Dahmer with some conviction, while Alex Wolff catches the eye as ‘Derf ’, the nearest he came to having a best friend. But the pace is slow and the story – which ends just before his first killing – not particularly enlightening.
A new François Ozon film used to be a cause for celebration, but not in the case of L’Amant Double (18) ★★, which clearly sets out to be some sort of pastiche of the sexy psycho-thriller with Hitchcockian overtones but ends up simply being tiresome and silly instead.
Marine Vacth, the star of his 2013 film Jeune & Jolie, plays Chloe, a beautiful but fragile young woman who falls in love with her psychotherapist, only to discover he’s got a secret twin brother, who’s also a psychotherapist – so she begins a sexual relationship with him too.
As you do, in this pretentious French nonsense that’s based on a Joyce Carol Oates novel and has distinct echoes of the old Jeremy Irons film Dead Ringers.
Ismael’s Ghosts (15) ★ is one of the worst films of the year and all the more dangerous for sounding like something you might actually want to see, with Mathieu Amalric playing an insomniac film-maker, Charlotte Gainsbourg his girlfriend and Marion Cotillard the wife who walked out on him 21 years ago. Then, suddenly, she reappears… If only the overindulged writer-director Arnaud Desplechin had left it at that. Interminable and unforgivable.