Tag: conspiracy thriller

September 5

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 6 February 2025
No Comments on September 5
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Director – Tim Fehlbaum – 2024 – US, Germany – Cert. 15 – 95m

****1/2

A dramatisation of the events of September 5, 1972 when broadcast TV sports journalists found themselves covering the terrorist kidnapping of Israeli athletes in the Olympic village – out in UK cinemas on Thursday, February 6th

There have been movies about the terrorist incident at the 1972 Olympics before: the documentary One Day in September (Kevin McDonald, 1999) and the drama about its aftermath Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005). Like the latter, September 5 is a drama. What marks it out as different, however, is that it tells the story from the point of view of broadcast journalists working out of a studio.

In this respect, its feeling for capturing the processes of live US network television renders it not entirely dissimilar to recent release Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024), yet in many ways, it couldn’t be more different. Saturday Night is about the birth of a legendary US comedy show; September 5 starts in an arguably similar area of entertainment (live sports coverage) before swiftly moving into the wider, more problematic area of live broadcast news coverage. The coverage of the incident around which September 5 is based forever changed the face of broadcast television media.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

La Syndicaliste
(lit. The Union Rep,
US: The Sitting Duck)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 30 June 2023
No Comments on La Syndicaliste
(lit. The Union Rep,
US: The Sitting Duck)
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Director – Jean-Paul Salomé – 2022 – France – Cert. 15 – 121m

***1/2

After a smart and tough-talking woman union rep in the nuclear power industry is attacked, tied up and raped in her own home, the police suggest she may have staged the attack herself – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 30th

Or, as its opening title states in the English subtitled print shown to press, La Syndicaliste Based On A True Story. That title comes after an opening in 2012 in which police are called to the home of Maureen Kearney (Isabelle Huppert) where her cleaning lady has freed her from a chair to which she was tied before being raped by an intruder. The forensic team are all over the premises, taking away evidence. At the police station, she requests a pad and pencil to write down the details of what happened. The police will later accuse Kearney of fabricating the whole incident herself.

The next half an hour or so is a flashback leading up to the incident. Immediately after the titles, it sets about establishing its heroine as a tireless campaigner for employee rights at French state-owner nuclear power company Areva, standing up for ruthlessly exploited workers in an Hungarian subsidiary and well in with Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Fois), the one female executive in an otherwise male boardroom who despite her reliability and excellent track record is being forced out, with as she later tells Maureen lots of dirty tricks used against her.… Read the rest

Tags Alan J. Pakula, Anne Lauvergeon, Annecy, Areva, attacked, Based On A True Story, board meeting, boardroom, campaigner, Christian Hecq, cleaning lady, clear your name, company, conflicting flashback, conspiracy, conspiracy thriller, corporate, corporate male, court, courtroom drama, dirty tricks, discredit, employee rights, evidence, executive, exploitation, fabrication, flashback, forced entry, forensics, France, Grégory Gadebois, home, house, husbands and wives, industrial relations, industry, institutionalised male violence, intruder, Irish, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Paul Salomé, Lake Annecy, lawyer, Marina Fois, Maureen Kearney, mole, nuclear power, Pierre Deladonchamps, police, police station, political, political thriller, rape, real and imaginary, state-owned, thriller, tied up, trade union, tribunal, union rep, Vesailles, whistleblower, Yvan Attal

Features Live Action Movies

The Post

Director – Steven Spielberg – 2017 – US – 12a – 116m

*****

The White House versus the press. Set in the 1970s, Steven Spielberg’s journalistic epic tells the story of The Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers – available for digital streaming

In 1971, The New York Times broke the story of the Pentagon Papers. These documents detailed how the incumbent Nixon administration and its predecessors had increased the scale of the US involvement in the unwinnable war in Vietnam for political gain rather than the national good. The administration’s response was swift and repressive: within two days, a legal injunction prevented the paper from publishing further details. The Washington Post (often shortened to The Post, as in the film title), at the time more a local paper than a national one, stepped into the breach with its reporters hunting down the New York Times’ source so that it could publish more of the story as it emerged. Having just floated on the New York Stock Exchange, the paper found itself in the tricky situation of being accountable to conservative shareholders who didn’t like the idea of exposing their investment to risks with the potential to close the paper down for good.… Read the rest