Review: A mesmerizing Marion Cotillard reigns over Lucile Hadžihalilovic's "The Ice Tower"
Friday, October 3, 2025 at 1:00PM 
The Ice Tower starts in the fashion of a trance-like fairytale, pulling you in through visions of refracted light, a snow globe landscape deconstructed by optical illusion. In the background, music twinkles, practically glistens as if singing the song one imagines a bauble would if it had a voice. And speaking of voices, a mellifluous woman sounds off, narrating and enchanting, beckoning closer in tones that feel like freshly fallen snow on a flushed cheek. It's Marion Cotillard, yet unseen but already magnetic as the Snow Queen and the actress who breathes life into her, a double role in a backstage melodrama with a Freudian spin.
Lucile Hadžihalilovic, one of contemporary cinema's most underrated masters, reunites with Cotillard, 21 years after Innocence, for a film that's both a free adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's classic story and its echo...