{"id":188437,"date":"2025-12-17T15:34:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T15:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/188437\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T15:34:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T15:34:07","slug":"best-movies-of-2025-in-the-us-no-3-the-ice-tower-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/188437\/","title":{"rendered":"Best movies of 2025 in the US: No 3 \u2013 The Ice Tower | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lucile Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 is a good bet for the most underrated director on the planet. She\u2019s only made four features in 20 years, but with obsessive consistency each time: an exquisitely controlled hermetic world that exudes weird biological and psychological anxieties \u2013 from the pre-pubescent prep school of 2004\u2019s Innocence, to the island hospital nurturing impregnated boys in 2015\u2019s Evolution<\/a>. These microcosms, governed by their own internal laws, seem to exist in some far-off arthouse realm indifferent to regular cinema.<\/p>\n

But her new film, The Ice Tower<\/a>, makes the coyest of glances towards commercial territory by rooting itself in Hans Christian Andersen. \u201cVast, immense, glittering like ice was the realm of the Snow Queen,\u201d lullabies Marion Cotillard in the preamble; the story is the preferred bedtime reading of teenage orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini), who escapes from her foster home, heads down the mountain, and stows away on a film production of the fairytale. The queen is being played by imperious diva Cristina van der Berg (who is played for us by none other than la Cotillard).<\/p>\n

Seen through Jeanne\u2019s eyes, it is film-making itself that, this time, becomes a rarefied, hieratic Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 world. The set-dressings, fittings and backstage loiterings are heavy with latent significance. Offering herself as an extra, Jeanne becomes an initiate in this rite. After Jeanne poses as \u201cBianca\u201d on set, Cristina adopts the girl with the white stuff as her protege; the kid, enthralled at finally entering the magic kingdom, is only too happy to comply. As scenes from the shoot spin kaleidoscopically into Jeanne\u2019s daydreams and back, Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 keeps us at a crepuscular threshold of the artificial and the real, fiction and the truth.<\/p>\n

But this is a cautionary tale, about the perils of fantasy and idolisation. Guided by her reverie, Jeanne doesn\u2019t understand what she is seeking from her frosty role model: a mother substitute, or an infatuation. Call it a madonna-hoar complex. Or perhaps it\u2019s even more: to become the Snow Queen herself. Sharing a similar forlorn past, Cristina knows the price of inhabiting the fantasia: \u201cYou think that is enough for her?\u201d she says of her character\u2019s splendid isolation. In the film\u2019s indeterminate analogue 1970s setting is a warning for all who are dazzled and entranced by too much imagery in the digital snowglobe.<\/p>\n

And where, as the ondes Martenot warbles disquietingly on the soundtrack, is the monster hiding in this fairytale? Could it be the director (played by Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107\u2019s real-life partner, directorial enfant terrible Gaspar No\u00e9<\/a>), seen at one point slime-ing up another ingenue? No, of course it must be Cotillard \u2013 reigning over the film, ever more claustrophobically, with trademark damaged hauteur. You could interpret The Ice Tower as a kind of #MeToo film \u2013 but one with a very French bent, the country having embraced the movement suspiciously. Perhaps the monster is film-making and art itself: hoarding and crystallising beauty, as Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 does so expertly, until desire hits absolute zero.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lucile Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 is a good bet for the most underrated director on the planet. She\u2019s only made four…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-188437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}