In the Italian film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci’s twisted love triangle, the penniless American student Matthew (Michael Pitt), the wealthy, Mao-quoting dilettante Théo (Louis Garrel) and his eccentric film nerd sister, Isabelle (Eva Green), are united by cinephilia. The threesome are essentially trapped in a Parisian apartment in the spring of 1968, in a city on the cusp of class revolution.
Yes, there’s lots of sex and full-frontal nudity, but this is really a film about the intoxicating allure of cinema and its desensitising power, written by the last genuinely great philosopher film critic, Gilbert Adair. He adapted the screenplay from his book The Holy Innocents, and the typically erudite dialogue and freely flowing film references evoke a time when cinema was, as the cliché goes,
