A Bigger Splash

Italian director Luca Guadagnino makes his English-language debut, as well as first narrative feature since 2009’s I Am Love, with the US Weekly art film A Bigger Splash. I Am Love star Tilda Swinton headlines as a Bowie-esque rocker whose post-surgery recuperation with her younger boyfriend (Matthias Schoenaerts) gets interrupted by the arrival of an influential ex (Ralph Fiennes) and his sexpot daughter (Dakota Johnson). A Bigger Splash is not nearly as lush and palatial as I Am Love, but it’s just as chilly and stylish and thin, an overinflated genre film highly dependent on magnetic performances to hold it together. Swinton is up to the task, regal and needy and detached in the same breath, just like a superstar, and so is a heedless Fiennes as a music industry sybarite still bragging about his contributions to one of the Rolling Stones’ worst albums; Schnoenaerts and Johnson, not so much. D.B.