Nicholas Cage goes for the jugular, writes BRIAN VINER

Renfield (15, 93 mins)

Verdict: Cage at his cagiest

Judgement: ***

Every now and then an actor slips into a role and it feels less like the work of a casting director and more like something dictated by the movie gods.

Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece The Godfather is a good example. And now we have Nicolas Cage, who happens to be Coppola’s cousin, as Count Dracula in the extremely gory comedy-horror film Renfield.

To say Cage sinks his teeth into the role would be an understatement. He consumes it completely, just as it digests him.

Cage has built a fine career from acting too much and has generally had the courage to choose characters to suit his heroically unsubtle style. That was never truer than it is from Dracula.

Apparently, Cage even agreed to have his teeth shaved so his alarming vampire dentures would fit properly. It is by all accounts an extravagant thoroughbred performance, a camply sinister hoot, and worth the price of admission in its own right.

The protagonist, however, is Nicholas Hoult’s eponymous servant, Robert Montagu Renfield, whose job, when he and the Earl arrive in modern New Orleans, is to supply his grim master with enough human blood to restore his waning strength.

Hoult is excellent too, seeming to channel Hugh Grant (his co-star in 2002’s About A Boy, when he was just 12) while Renfield goes about his business with a very English trepidation.

He’s still a killer though, deriving his superhuman strength from eating bugs, a forced comedic flourish that the story just doesn’t need.

Much funnier is his determination to break free from his “destructive relationship” with Dracula, for which he attends a therapy group for those with controlling partners.

No one is quite sure what he is up against in the eerie abandoned hospital where he and Dracula have settled, but the group leader listens to his lament and assures him that he is clearly a victim of classic narcissistic behavior.

Later, there is a priceless moment when, instead of a crucifix or a head of garlic, he waves at the Count a copy of a self-help book, How To Defend Yourself Against A Narcissist.

The idea of ​​Renfield and his blood-sucking Transylvanian master confronting a very 21st-century array of sensibilities, with couples counseling and encounters to share compassion around every corner, is brilliant.

It could have – made it should – have supported this blissfully concise film on its own.

Unfortunately, director Chris McKay and writer Ryan Ridley don’t stop there.

Perhaps to distance their picture from other vampire comedies, such as the 2014 inspired “mockumentary” What We Do In The Shadows, they play the Batman card and give us a city steeped in crime, ruled by a family of mobsters who run the police. and justice in your pocket.

If anything, this gives us the ever-watchable Awkwafina as Quincy, the only cop with integrity in a cesspool of corruption, who develops a completely mutual crush on Renfield after he saves her neck in a violent shootout.

But it undermines the film’s originality, making it look like 100 other superhero movies and over-the-top crime thrillers. That’s a real shame, because Cage’s Dracula deserves a bite of screen immortality, and Renfield probably won’t provide it.

Assassin Club 15, 111 minutes)

Verdict: deadly

Judgement: *

On the other hand, Renfield is a thousand times more original than the desperately corny and derivative Assassin Club.

It stars Henry Golding as Morgan, a former Royal Marine reinvented as the world’s greatest assassin, with Sam Neill as that obligatory character in films like these, the urbane but unethical controller, who sends him instructions via the ever-present earpiece that there is no frantic firefights. or chasing a stairwell ever seems to vibrate out of its pilot hole.

When Morgan discovers that he and a bunch of other leading international assassins have all been given contracts to terminate each other, and must send a severed finger to a Paris address to prove they committed the murder, he takes it seriously. .

What worries him a little more is the danger this all poses to his fragrant Italian girlfriend (Daniela Melchior), who, to add to her sweet innocence, is a school teacher.

Of course, the assassins all prefer different methods of killing. They’re like the Magnificent Seven, by which I don’t mean Sleepy, Dopey, Happy, Sneezy and co, even though this movie is cartoonishly bad.

The most dangerous of them is called Falk and is played by Noomi Rapace, who (like Sam Neill) really should know better.

As for Golding, even as his film career develops, he is still, as far as I know, a co-presenter on the BBC’s The Travel Show.

Maybe that’s why he agreed to appear in this mess, which may look like the worst audition ever for James Bond, but at least takes us on a tour of those European cities – including London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Lisbon and Ljubljana – where hitmen might jump from fourth floor windows onto the top of parked cars.

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Too in love with Mr. Ripley’s talented, but flawed creator

There’s a reason most screen adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s books (think Strangers On A Train, The Talented Mr Ripley, and Carol) have been so good.

Partly because they ended up in the hands of first-class directors, but also because her stories are fundamentally cinematic.

In the hands of Alfred Hitchcock, the brilliant premise behind Strangers On A Train (two men who agreed to trade kills so that neither would be a suspect) was sure to lead to something memorable, and so it did.

Fragments of that 1951 thriller and of Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) grace Eva Vitija’s admiring documentary Loving Highsmith (12, 83 min, ★★✩✩✩).

The title of the film is important in two ways. Fascinatingly, Vitija interviews several of Highsmith’s female lovers, and the fact that one is French and the other German, and that she keeps diaries in both languages, shows how extraordinarily well traveled she was for a woman born in 1921 in Texas.

But that title also reflects the nature of the film itself. It’s too enamored with the subject to give us a full understanding of what drove her.

For instance, the intensity of her abominable anti-Semitism is brushed off in a single cheerful reference to her “tirades” in later years against Jews, Arabs and blacks.

Yet an excellent recent biography revealed her frequent grumbling that Hitler had not gone far enough. A better documentary would have said something about that.

Mia Hansen-Love’s One Fine Morning (15, 112 min, ★★★★✩) is a thoughtful French-language drama about a young widow (Lea Seydoux) whose life is a juggling between caring for her demented father and raising her only daughter. and start a love affair with an old friend, now married.

It can’t be anything other than French, which makes me wonder if the French ever watch a movie and think it’s “quintessentially English.” Continue to the Khyber, perhaps?