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While best known for his glamorous portraits of high-society figures, John Singer Sargent was equally fascinated by the intricate relationship between appearance and essence. This focus comes through clearly in the new documentary “Sargent: Fashion & Swagger.”

Born in Italy in 1856, Sargent was immersed from a young age in art and travel thanks to his cultured family. After studying under pioneering portraitist Carolus-Duran in Paris, Sargent established a successful London studio. Here, wealthy clients commission him to memorialize them in their finest attire.

Yet the film shows Sargent saw far beyond mere surfaces. Regardless of how lavishly dressed he was, he uniquely captured the sitters’ humanity beneath stylized poses. Through exploration of key works, interviews reveal how he subtly played with compositional framing and lighting to articulate inner psychological complexities. Sargent relished both the technical challenge of rendering sumptuous fabrics and the opportunity to study how clothing shapes our self-perception.

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Pablo Larraín’s primary mode is deconstruction, of everything from genre to myth to ideology. But given its intensely subjective point of view, El Conde shares more in common with Spencer and Jackie than the filmmaker’s earlier investigations into Chile’s tumultuous past, Post Mortem and No. The film seeks to dispense with the historical record and imagine what happens behind closed doors. Of course, there’s one important difference here: El Conde is certainly no stickler for verisimilitude, as the Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) of this film is a morose vampire fasting from blood in order to ease himself into death.

That premise might suggest that Larraín has sympathy for the devil, but El Conde is no hagiography. The film renders Pinochet as an aging, ever-prattling child of sorts, who no longer wants to live in a Chile that has no appreciation for all his “great work,” nor...

The Augusto Pinochet regime, which ruled Chile under an oppressive thumb with unspeakable human rights violations from 1973 to 1990, following the coup d’état that ousted Socialist president Salvador Allende, has been the subject of countless screen dramas. That includes a loose trilogy by Pablo Larraín, comprised of Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No, all of which observed the dictatorship from unique angles. But even by the director’s own distinctive standards, his return to the subject is a wild leap into irreverent originality, reimagining the deposed tyrant as a 250-year-old vampire on the verge of relinquishing eternal life.

Shot in ravishingly textured, crepuscular black and white by the great Ed Lachman, the Netflix film (opening Sept. 8 in theaters before streaming from Sept. 15) is as visually intoxicating and atmospheric as it is provocative, liberally mixing political satire with dark comedy and horror while examining a grim history that seems doomed to keep repeating itself.

If Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín displayed one constant over the course of a stunningly multifarious filmography since his breakout sophomore feature “Tony Manero” (2006), it’s his inquisitiveness pitched at the fault lines of politics and family. He sinks his teeth deep—so deep—into that curiosity in his luminous and pensively funny political satire “El Conde,” a fiercely original genre outing that imagines notorious Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a centuries-old vampire and inventively considers the perpetual, shape-shifting nature of evil that goes unpunished.

A long-dead dictator who’s in fact undead and still poisoning the veins of the nation while his kin pecks at his wealth like voracious vultures? What a perfectly gothic playground for Larraín, one that aptly dwells in the shadows of a nondescript stony mansion and liberally draws blood out of the director’s own greatest hits. Expect the sardonic humor of Larraín’s political period masterwork “No” here,...

As Chile prepares to mark 50 years since the Sept. 11, 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín is back in Venice – following “Spencer” in 2021 – with scathing satire “El Conde,” in which Pinochet, a symbol of global fascism, resurfaces as a 250-year old vampire living in a rundown rural mansion after faking his death.

“Pinochet had never been portrayed in film or TV before,” Larrain said. “The approach we chose led us to combine elements of farce and satire,” he added. “It’s probably the only way. If you avoid satire there is a risk of creating empathy, and that’s not acceptable.”

A local journalist asked how the cast thinks the potent allegorical film will play in Chile. In a vote last May, Chileans rejected a proposal to rewrite the country’s dictatorship-era constitution. In other words, Pinochet still seems to have a lot of local fans.

“It will either...