Tag: document

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Nosferatu
(2024)

Director – Robert Eggers – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 132m

*****

Unaware a woman has unwittingly summoned Count Orloc, her husband is sent to the latter’s castle in Transylvania – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, January 1st 2025

The German expressionist silent film Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) has been described as setting the cinematic template for the horror film. Broadly speaking, it’s an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, with names changed for the purposes either of connecting to the German audience or avoiding copyright issues. While there have been numerous Dracula movie adaptations and spin-offs over the years, remakes of the 1922 film are comparatively few and far between; prior to the current film, Werner Herzog notably made Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

Eggers is a great admirer of the 1922 film, and originally planned to remake it after The Witch (2015). It’s not hard to see why. His films have about them a terrible sense of dread, of dire events about to occur. Like F.W. Murnau, he is a great visual stylist (although the silent film industry of the 1920s was very different to the far more sophisticated sector of today). The film has had time to marinate in his head for the best part of a decade, which has probably done the project no harm at all.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Reality

Director – Tina Satter – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 83m

*****

A young woman working in US security services is questioned in her home by two FBI interrogators who believe she’s leaked classified documents to The Intercept – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, June 2nd

This film is based on a true story. That commonly used phrase can encompass everything from attempts at verisimilitude through to extreme misrepresentation. This film, however, is something different from most films bearing that legend.

The true story on which this film is based is an interview of a woman by two FBI agents. That organisation’s protocols dictate that such incidents, planned ahead of their execution, must be recorded in transcription form. So the film is not based on the incident so much as it is based on the official transcript of it. That includes not only the verbal words, but also pauses or gaps on the parts of those speaking them.

Writer-director Satter was hooked by the transcript and has already turned it into the critically acclaimed Broadway play Is This A Room. Theatre and cinema, while they often share certain elements, are essentially two different media; a successful play has an immediate attraction to movie producers who believe its proven theatrical track record will sell cinema tickets, yet the cinema is littered with stagebound adaptation of plays which worked far better on stage than screen.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Reality

Interrogating the text

Reality
Directed by Tina Satter
Certificate 12a, 83 minutes
Released 2 June

A film named after not, as you might imagine, a state of truth, but a young woman, the main protagonist Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney). She works in a US security facility, translating documents from Farsi to English. The room in which she works separates its workers into cubicles with dual computer screens and workstations. TVs on the wall constantly play Fox News.

They say that truth is stranger than fiction. This is not one of those ‘based on a true story’ movies; it actually is a true story in that the dialogue (along with the pauses within it) is lifted from the FBI transcript of the real life interrogation of the real life Reality Winner.

So, the actors take the words, pauses and so forth, and… [Read the rest in Reform magazine]

Reality is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Friday, June 2nd.

Read my review at Reform magazine.

Read my alternative review for this site.

Trailer:

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Features Live Action Movies

The Wife
And
Her House Husband

Director – Marcus Markou – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 86m

****

A divorcing couple follow instructions in a document they handwrote between them back when it seemed they’d be in love forever – out in selected UK cinemas (admission only one pound) from Friday, March 10th

Cassie (Laura Bayston – smart crimson suit, smart shirt) and Matt (Laurence Spellman from the director’s earlier short Two Strangers Who Meet Five Times – cheap hoodie) are at the end of their relationship. Somewhere along the line, it was good. But then it all went wrong. And now, here they are at their final meeting in her solicitor’s offices (£250 an hour, she’s paying) sorting everything out. She’s given him the house, half her salary.

Back at the beginning of their relationship, between them, they handwrote a document to be read and acted upon should it all come to this. Each of their handwriting gives away which bits they each wrote, which is just as well because their memories aren’t that good and they don’t remember writing parts of it. Or even any of it. But she just wants the chance to say goodbye. Properly. An ending.

First item on the list: to meet up in the park where they first met 20 years ago.… Read the rest

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Wings Of Desire
(Der Himmel
Über Berlin)

Director – Wim Wenders – 1987 – Germany – Cert. PG – 128m

*****

Angels move around Berlin, watching over Berliners, until one of them sees a beautiful girl and decides he wants to become human and experience emotion for himself – out in cinemas on Friday, June 24th and playing on Film 4 from Wednesday, June 29th to Thursday, July 28th

This film is many things. It is, first and foremost, about angels, here captured in stunning black and white cinematography and represented as men moving invisibly among the population of Berlin, observing them, listening to their thoughts, hopes, fears and dreams, perhaps imparting some sort of spiritual comfort by a touch of the hand. And just as Henri Alekan’s camera photographs the actors playing angels, so too it photographs those Berliners they observe and comfort.

The iconic Hollywood actor Peter Falk – known to millions of TV viewers as the detective Columbo – plays himself playing a character on the set of a war film and hanging out between takes. The camera takes great pleasure in simply observing him doing what he does, for instance talking to an angel he can’t see (“I can’t see you, but I know you’re here”) which might be an attempt to communicate with invisible beings or might equally well be no more than an acting routine.… Read the rest