‘People who commit heinous crimes can be victims’: Michael Mann on the provocative power of Manhunter at 40

As a stunning 4K restoration arrives in theaters, the director and cast reflect on creating the disturbing descent into a criminal underworld Michael Mann has shown time and again in films like Thief , Heat , Miami Vice and Public Enemies that he is one of American film’s greatest explorers of the underworld. “It’s like a kind of cultural anthropology,” Mann tells me from his office in Los Angeles. “If you make films, you get to do that in a different place with a different subject every few years. For me, the exploration is the high.” With its unsettling atmosphere and soaring beauty, Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter reimagined how a thriller could look, sound and feel in an early high point for the director. To commemorate its 40th anniversary Manhunter: The Final Cut , a 4K restoration and director’s cut with three minutes of new footage, will see a theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles this weekend with a nationwide US rollout to follow. Continue reading... from Film | The ...

Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose review – mysterious mammal in period hoax yarn

Peculiar true story of 1930s media sensation becomes an even odder, laboriously serious drama featuring Simon Pegg with Freudian facial hair

Here is a peculiar film based on a peculiar real-life case: the “talking mongoose” hoax that became a newspaper sensation in the 1930s, the crop circle story of its day. The Irvings, a farming family in the Isle of Man, claimed there was a mongoose called Gef in their farmhouse that could speak – although no independent observer ever saw the creature, but only heard its bizarre voice in the walls or under the floorboards. The obvious explanation was close at hand: the daughter of the family made no secret of being a talented ventriloquist.

Despite this, it amused the press to maintain a deadpan attitude to the possibility of “Gef” being real, and there was no shortage of credulous and excitable spiritualists who were excited by the idea. One was the Hungarian-born paranormal investigator Nandor Fodor who came to Man, convinced that Gef was not a con trick precisely, but a manifestation of group hysteria. He is played here with commitment and sincerity by Simon Pegg, sporting tailoring and facial hair like a young Sigmund Freud. Writer-director Adam Sigal imagines an assistant for him: Anne, played by Minnie Driver.

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