What a dizzying new spy thriller took from Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress

Watching Reflection in a Dead Diamond is like falling down a rabbit hole lined with images from every spy movie you’ve ever seen, and a thousand you probably haven’t. Inspired by the Eurospy movement — the ’60s era of stylized, sexy, spoofy European movies satirizing James Bond, and drawing from Italy’s adults-only fumetti neri comics — Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s film opens with an old man sitting by the beach at a seaside resort, where the gleam in the diamond nipple ring of a topless sunbather sends him off on a dizzying reverie about his time as a super-spy.