Manuel Messerli

One of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. Full stop. As exhilarating as it is devastating. Thought-provoking American blockbuster filmmaking at its very best. The story, characters, and performances are all top-notch. The ending is both controversial and frustrating and it left me reflecting on our reality with nuclear weapons - exactly as the filmmakers intended. Bigelow once again proves that she’s one of the finest action directors working today. Five out of five stars, without hesitation.

I view this new Nosferatu primarily as an exercise in style. It’s undoubtedly beautifully shot, yet I don’t find anything particularly new or inventive. Narratively, as far as I can tell, it’s a fairly accurate retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with the usual changes to character names and settings to reflect the original 1922 Nosferatu. Those changes were necessary because Dracula was still under copyright in 1922, and the filmmakers couldn’t secure the rights to Stoker's novel. This 2024 Nosferatu is well acted and visually stunning, but that’s about it. While that’s an achievement in its own right, it leaves me questioning the purpose of this remake.

The film definitely is stylish, with some interesting visual ideas - l really liked the overhead Hollywood Blvd. sequence at the beginning - but the story feels overly simple and, worse, quite predictable - especially for anyone familiar with Cronenberg's body-horror classic 'The Fly'. There are also several other clear 'references' throughout: visually, it obviously borrows heavily from Kubrick's 'The Shining', with certain scenes, like the hallway and bathroom, lifted almost exactly. Dennis Quaid's character, particularly in his introductory scene where he peels shrimp, seems at the very least heavily inspired by Peter Greenaway's amazing 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover'. Watching 'The Substance' on Mubi, I found myself reaching for the fast-forward button a few times when it dragged. Overall, it’s not terrible, but it’s far from great or original.

While ‘Silence of the Lambs’ is a thriller with an inherent logic and with believable characters doing believable things in realistic settings that give the movie a strong sense of reality (all based on an amazing script) Longlegs is not that kind of movie at all. It is really more like a surreal horror movie with religious themes and whatnot. While It def does have an unnerving mood throughout - with some pretty basic jumpscares - it is all in all quite nonsensical - which is fine because it is not a thriller it is a horror movie. But it left me disappointed because I was expecting something different, something more disturbing, something “real” (probably thanks to the promo campaign which was great but also kind of misleading). And the ending that explains what has happened by literally having a character explain it to another character, that is just not very good writing in my opinion. All in all stylistically nice (although why do cops always have to investigate at night, just to make it more creepy?) with a fantastic Nic Cage but the script isn’t great to say the least and the story is actually pretty thin.