Critics reviews

It’s a demented kitsch mess (although the smeary digital video does match the muddled narrative), but it’s savvy about celebrity and has more guts and energy than much of what will open this year.

Though Scarlet Diva contains flashes of pungent black humor and self-deprecation, it's hard to know how seriously Argento takes herself, or how much her real life has been inflated for dramatic effect. But part of the film's sleazy, ramshackle appeal is that these are essentially open questions.

It is, by conventional standards, a fairly terrible movie -- crudely shot on digital video, indifferently acted (in three languages) and chaotically written (by Ms. Argento) -- but it is also weirdly fascinating, a ready-made Eurotrash cult object. It is also, at times, curiously moving.

When twentysomething hotsies make movies about their lives, hard-driving narcissism is a given, but what a world we’d live in if Argento’s Hollywood counterparts—say, Sarah Michelle Gellar, or even Christina Ricci—had this much imagination and nerve. Few of them, at any rate, have Argento’s reserves of lonesome passion and unspigoted woe.

The reflexivity of the piece (Anna currently works on her first screenplay, Scarlet Diva) is an obvious one yet nonetheless fascinating.