Film

The Look of Love

Name: The Look of Love
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Released: 2013
Cast: Steve Coogan, Anna Friel, Imogen Poots, Tamsin Egerton, Chris Addison

Biopic

Michael Winterbottom's tragicomic biopic of Paul Raymond, the impresario who built a pornography and entertainment empire into extraordinary wealth, only to watch it crumble amid personal tragedy. Steve Coogan inhabits the role with dark charm—funny and calculating by turns. It's a film about ambition, excess, and the hollowness of accumulation, wrapped in the gaudy textures of 1970s and 80s London. Uneven but unforgettable.

TMDb rating

2.8

If you liked this

The Wolf of Wall Street2013

Same year, same fever dream of excess and acquisition. DiCaprio's Belfort and Coogan's Raymond are spiritual cousins—charming hustlers watching their empires and families implode in real time. The energy is manic and blackly comic.

But Nearly three hours of hard partying and moral bankruptcy can feel punishing rather than entertaining, and the film occasionally seems to revel in its own seediness without questioning it.

Bronson2009

Another Nicolas Winding Refn collaboration with Coogan—stylish, violent, and deeply interested in charisma as a weapon. Tom Hardy embodies controlled rage the way Coogan embodies controlled appetite. Formally inventive and impossible to look away from.

But It's deliberately claustrophobic and repetitive by design. The aesthetics matter more than conventional narrative momentum, which some find pretentious.

I, Daniel Blake2016

Ken Loach captures the same unflinching attention to how systems destroy individuals, but from the opposite angle—the powerless rather than the powerful. Dave Johns gives a quietly devastating performance as a man crushed by bureaucracy.

But It's a social realist polemic with little humour. The mood is grey and the ending is not earned catharsis but accumulated despair.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Satisfaction1988

Both examine how industries built on bodily display and sexual commerce operate, but Raymond looks from the predator's chair and Satisfaction from the stage. One inverts the other's moral gravity.

Joan Freeman's film about an all-female rock band navigating the music industry in the 1980s. Like Raymond, it's about exploitation and ambition and the economics of the body, but from the perspective of the exploited. It's colourful, musical, and rarely mentioned.

But It's a glossy 80s rock film that tries to be both serious and entertaining. Some sequences feel lightweight beside the subject matter, and the ending compromises its own analysis.

In the Loop2009

Armando Iannucci's savage political satire has the same dark comedy DNA—ambitious men destroying themselves and others through talk. Peter Capaldi's spin doctor is Coogan's Raymond in a different costume. Viciously funny.

But The jargon-heavy dialogue moves fast and assumes you track political machinery. It can feel locked off to people not fluent in Westminster speak.

Sweet Smell of Success1957

Burt Lancaster's ruthless gossip columnist prefigures Raymond—a man who builds an empire on exploitation and sexuality, then watches it corrode. The dialogue is baroque and the morality is unflinching. A perfect formal precursor.

But It's shot in crisp black-and-white and moves at 1950s pace. Modern audiences sometimes find it airless or slow despite its brilliance.

Hustlers2019

Lorene Scafaria's film about strippers running a con has the same DNA—ambition, exploitation, and the question of who is victimising whom. It's funny and uncomfortable and interested in female agency in systems designed to abuse it.

But Some find it glossy and too sympathetic to its characters. The film's ambivalence about morality might read as contradiction rather than complexity.

The Death of Stalin2017

Armando Iannucci again, this time directing. Black-and-white Soviet farce about ambitious men stepping over corpses to accumulate power. The tone is comic but the human cost is never obscured. Formally inventive and deeply smart.

But The rapid-fire dialogue and Russian names can be hard to track. It's also a period piece about internal Soviet politics, which requires some historical patience.

Climax2018

Gaspar Noé's film about a dance troupe whose sangria is spiked with LSD descends into chaos and tragedy. Like Raymond, it watches a closed world implode. The formal ambition and the genuine horror are remarkable.

But It's visually and emotionally punishing. Long takes of human degradation and violence will alienate many viewers. This is not entertainment in any conventional sense.

Possession1981

Both films are interested in how capitalism sexualises bodies and sells them—Raymond as an entrepreneur, Żuławski as a hallucinogenic descent. One is cold and cynical, one is hot and baroque, but they're examining the same wound.

Andrzej Żuławski's fever dream of a marriage collapsing into psychosis and body horror. Isabelle Adjani is extraordinary. It's not about pornography, but it's intensely interested in bodies, sexuality, commodification, and how systems of desire destroy their participants.

But It's deliberately excessive and allegorical in a way that resists clarity. Subtitled, formally brutal, and often extremely weird. Not for viewers wanting straightforward narrative or comfort.

The Sting1973

Both are about men building elaborate systems to get what they want, and both are fascinated by style and performance as tools. But Winterbottom shows consequences where Scorsese and Hill show triumph. One is fantasy, one is reckoning.

Paul Newman and Robert Redford run an elaborate con against a gangster in Depression-era Chicago. It's stylish, funny, and structured like a magic trick. But beneath the charm it's about how systems work, who has power, and how to exploit it.

But It's a Hollywood entertainment that doesn't want you thinking too hard. The film is so charming it can feel slight, and it lets its protagonists off lightly in ways Raymond doesn't permit itself.