"It's not quite reality." A hugely influential work — hurling the found footage genre into the mainstream and, on a $60,000 budget, continuing to shape the aesthetic qualities of many horror movies 25 year later — made at a turning point in film history: the reliable, trustworthy images provided by the cumbersome black-and-white 16mm camera (documentary director Heather insists on getting footage on film even as the trio of characters convincingly lose their minds, as though only it can prove…
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The Thin Blue Line 1988
"Because I'm the one that knows."
Your Making A Murderer, your OJ: Made in America, your dozens upon dozens of cookie-cutter Netflix shows and lengthy Jim Can't Swim YouTube interrogation analyses — if you're looking for ground zero of true crime, this is it. Since 1988 this type of thing has ballooned into a multi-billion dollar industry; if it was made today it would be in six parts over six hours. And true crime has rightly become the subject of…
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Black Bag 2025
America's most prolific director's take on Melville alienation thriller/BBC Sunday night spy whodunnit drama is a bit undercooked — Snowden and Stuxnet perhaps date the screenplay — but still a fun time; a bit better than Michael Fassbender's attempt at this in The Killer and much better than Cate Blanchett's attempt at this in Disclaimer. Marisa Abela is great in everything; wish Brosnan was given more to do. Also cool to see London properly rendered as dark, grey corporate non-place…
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Can't Get You Out of My Head 2021
Can't Get You Out of My Head is made up of fragments: from Mao's wife Jiang Qing's quest for personal revenge, to a plan to hide 600 nuclear missiles under Greenland; from German revolutionaries going on strike at a Palestinian training camp, to a vibrator which tracked users' behaviour without their knowldege.
Don't worry: fans of Adam Curtis bingo won't be disappointed (timecoded stock footage — check; ominous shots of Canary Wharf — check; "something very strange was happening" —…
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The Zone of Interest 2023
LFF 2023 #12 — Had a video of someone laughing and gloating about power and water being cut off to two million people delivered to my retinas before this screening, so I perhaps wasn't in the best mood for a lengthy treatise on specifically the banality of evil. This is an interesting and arresting formal exercise, making deft use of infrared imagery and (according to the Q+A — it wasn't obvious in the film) a 10-camera setup and takes lasting…
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