Critic’s Choice: Kristen Stewart gives a medium-cool performance in ‘Personal Shopper’
Few actresses this year have commanded the screen as forcefully, or with such seemingly little effort, as Kristen Stewart does in “Personal Shopper,” now out in a new Blu-ray/DVD edition from Criterion Collection. In this second English-language collaboration with the French director Olivier Assayas, who directed her to a César Award in 2014’s “Clouds of Sils Maria,” Stewart makes a quietly magnetic impression as a lonely American in Paris, where she buys couture for a local celebrity by day and tries to contact the spirit of her dead brother by night.
It’s a wonderfully preposterous setup for a movie that begins as a ghost story, accelerates into a breathless railway thriller and ends somewhere astride the abyss separating this world from the next. Befitting the auteur behind “Irma Vep,” “Carlos” and “Summer Hours,” Assayas never makes the same movie twice, and his storytelling instincts here are as unpredictable as they are marvelously assured.
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