Byzantium is Neil Jordan’s best vampire movie.

Byzantium (2012)

There’s no need to interview a vampire from Interview with a Vampire The second (and perhaps stronger) undead romantic drama directed by Neil Jordan. IN ByzantiumKind-hearted Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) – 16 to 200 – is forced to share the secret of her life from the very beginning. She constantly writes her tragic story down on paper and then scatters those pages to the wind, waiting for the right mortal to come along and understand.

She and her mother Clara (Gemma Arterton) live more or less on the run and soon return to the dark English beach town where their saga began. There, Clara finds an unsuspecting man who helps her open a brothel, while Eleanor enrolls in art school and begins searching for a weak local boy (Caleb Landry Jones) with blood cancer.

Byzantium this is far from the only vampire film to reflect on how eternal life becomes a curse of the cyclical nature of time. But his ability to authentically blend 19th-century gothic memories with the seedy but good-natured present day lends mystery and grit to Eleanor and Clara’s nomadic lives, 200 years of sex work, and a mother-daughter bond that feels more like a sisterhood in arrested development.

These textures and themes make Byzantium one of Jordan’s most underrated works and a showcase for both Arterton and Ronan playing both the intelligence accumulated over centuries and the emotional paralysis of the eternity of who they were at the moment of “creation”. Hollywood, October 1.

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Cinema 21: East of Eden (1955), September. thirty. Cinematic: Human Children (2006), September. 23, 24 and 29. God’s city (2002), September. October 30. 1. Clinton: A vampire (1932), October 2. Hollywood: Mean Streets (1973), September. thirty. Magic Cop (1990), October 3. Star Trek (2009), October 4. Living room: Enter the Dragon (1973), October 1, 3 and 5.