thesis movie cast

Jotted Lines

A Collection Of Essays

Tesis / Thesis (1996 Movie): Summary & Analysis

Summary: .

Film student Ángela is writing her thesis on violence in audiovisual media. At the university, she discovers the body of her thesis director, Prof. Figueroa, who died while watching a video that turns out to be a snuff film. The plot of this psychological thriller unfolds through Ángela’s research on the disappearance of a former classmate, tortured and murdered on tape. Unsure about whom to trust, Ángela is targeted as the next victim as she draws closer to exposing an underground ring of snuff films produced by a fellow student and professor. Set in the 1990s, the film engages a critique of violence in television and film, market forces producing audiovisual media, and voyeuristic desires of audiences, as well as the burgeoning practices of security camera vigilance in public spaces. 

Amenábar’s feature-length debut, a psychological thriller of the intrigue genre about ‘snuff’ film, is in many ways an exploration into the darkest underside of the demand for spectacle in which visual media are produced, whether for television or film. As the film student Ángela pursues research for her thesis on audiovisual violence (‘a daily occurrence in film and television’), her desire to view footage all too graphic to appear in the media is eclipsed by the dangers of exposing an underground ring of snuff films produced in the university. It is this turn from Ángela’s interest in viewing graphic violence to the threat that she herself could become the next victim of a snuff film which structures the narrative for viewers, similarly to the genre of a detective thriller whodunit, in which all relationships outside the family are suspect. The ensuing intrigue confronts viewers with complex questions about spectatorship itself in which the morbid interest in seeing tortured and mutilated bodies censored from the public eye is satisfied by an underground market that must ‘give the audience what it wants to see’, as Professor Castro (one author of the snuff ring) lectures to his film students. In this sense, the notion of desire constructed in the film is understood as a complex, intersecting terrain of psychological, market-driven, and sociocultural factors which generate, at once, the spectator’s libidinal desire to consume censored images, an underground market of snuff film produced in response to the demand for violence, and the gendered roles of the characters as either objects or perpetrators of this violence, among others. The demand for morbid images, in other words, exists within a market economy inseparable from the characters’ fascination with and horror for ‘real’ explicit visual material that is censored or in the case of Ángela’s research subject, conspicuous in the media. 

Notably, it is only once Ángela perceives that she is being pursued as the next victim of the snuff ring, as the very object of filmed violence which both terrifies and intrigues her, that her desire to view graphic images begins to wane, leading her to abandon her research altogether by the end of the film. Nevertheless, Ángela’s ambiguous transformation from a subject who desires to see recorded violence to become herself a target of ‘real’ violence is not entirely clear given that Amenábar constructs desire for his audience in less simplistic terms.1 Viewers are shown images of Ángela peeking through her fingers to catch a glimpse of the filmed horror that so fascinates her, an ambivalence which is evidently more complex in her character’s psychological portrait. For, Ángela also fantasises about a sexual encounter with the suspect Bosco in a disturbing dream sequence which oscillates between Ángela’s terrified resistance to her aggressor, who subdues her in bed with a suggestive phallic switchblade, and her erotic attempt held at knifepoint to seduce Bosco, which could be read as a survival tactic were it not for the director’s choice to portray this scene disturbingly with evident lust. To her horror, a dreaming Ángela realises that she is being filmed during the sex act, as an object of desire targeted for annihilation, which draws a clear parallel for the film’s viewers between woman as object in pornography and the brutal victimisation of the innocent in snuff. This parallel is furthermore reinforced by an earlier shot of the university film catalogue in which hardcore ‘pornography and other films’ (snuff) are categorised and archived together. The dream sequence, along with the late revelation that Ángela has been filmed secretly at home by her co-researcher Chema – a recording in which she caresses and kisses the image of Bosco displayed on the television screen – emphasises the perverse trappings of a desire through which Ángela’s character, unknown to the film’s audience, had demonstrated a conscious, invested sexual interest in the suspect Bosco, caught on tape. The voyeuristic recording likewise exposes her projected desire for simulacrum in the form of images (in film, television), a scene with greater social implications than Ángela’s character portrait alone. Sexual desire is played out similarly in displaced ways among other characters, in Bosco’s attempt to seduce Ángela’s unsuspecting younger sister, in Ángela’s ‘feigned’ kiss with Bosco in order to distance her sister from the suspected assassin, in the alleged jealousy of Bosco’s girlfriend towards Ángela, in Chema’s voyeuristic recording of Ángela, and even between men in Bosco and Chema’s former friendship which remained a secret to Ángela, a suspicious matter when this bond was revealed to her by Bosco’s girlfriend. 

In this sense, Ángela’s confession earlier in the film ‘I don’t like to be recorded’ echoes Amenábar’s recurrent questioning of camera vigilance and its blurred distinction between the public eye and private intimacy, whether subjects are deliberately filmed, as in these scenes, or passively recorded by the university’s security cameras which provide evidence to incriminate Ángela in the discovery of Professor Figueroa’s dead body in the auditorium. Viewers might draw an immediate comparison between the growing presence of security cameras in public space at the time of the film’s release and Amenábar’s critique of camera vigilance, both public and private. Moving beyond this initial assessment, the film also suggests that even when institutional vigilance is justified under the guise of security (i.e., mandated by the university or state), and thereby presumably void of subjective interest, a voyeuristic desire indeed underpins authority and serves to both conserve and usurp it; as viewers will remember, the closed circuit cameras incriminate Ángela, but also film Professor Castro’s suspicious lurking presence in the university film archive before Figueroa’s death. 

In its increasingly muddied distinction between the public and private, intimacy and vigilance, the film also problematises the strict separation between access to mediated (recorded or simulated) violence in the form of images and ‘real violence’ experienced in the first person.2 Viewers are reminded throughout the film that any absolute distinction between the ‘mediated’ and the ‘real’ – whether desire, violent images, or otherwise – is ultimately ungrounded. Ángela asks Chema if he has ever seen a real dead body, which gives way to two interpretations: Chema asserts that he has, in the explicit video recordings he watches with Ángela, and yet to the contrary, for Ángela audiovisual violence is not ‘real’ per se (she argues, ‘not on television, but a real dead body’). From the film’s opening sequence in a train station, in which Ángela approaches the train tracks desiring to view a ‘body split in two’ that is never actually seen (through the camera that occupies her first-person gaze), Amenábar structures the film’s imagery, and at times Ángela’s sight, through similar camerawork that seldom shows significant footage of gore, if at all.3 Instead, the characters’ horror is transmitted to the audience through shots of their expressions when viewing the snuff film and, most importantly, through the viewer’s psychological response when imagining violent images through the use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, particularly in the victim’s chilling screams for help as she is being tortured. In fact, Amenábar’s choice not to show viewers significant violence or gore, but rather to play on the viewer’s horror by imagining this violence through sound, is perhaps most noteworthy for film students interested in Amenábar’s use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in conjunction with the full omission of visual information (i.e. established as a motif in the opening sequence with a recorded voice-off which fades to the first frame).4 Chema and Ángela’s tense adventure into the cellar of the university archives, equipped with only a box of matches that must be lit consecutively, also plays with the audience’s ability to see only the duration of each lighted match, interspersed with shots of complete darkness which play upon the viewer’s expectations of surprise in the thriller genre. Such is the nature of Ángela’s psychological, imaginative horror when she chooses not to view the snuff film, at first, but darkens her television screen through the contrast function so that only the audio recording can be heard, which proves disturbing for her character in later scenes, as she listens obsessively to the film’s audio recording on her portable tape recorder. 

Nevertheless, it should be noted that when violent images are shown to the film’s viewers, Amenábar often chooses to demonstrate the characters’ ability to analyse them critically. For, the rapid advances in digital camera technology at the time are what lead Chema and Ángela to deduce the brand of camera used to record the snuff film, through a close analysis of the recording’s image quality, as well as the camera’s date of release and purchase, which would serve as vital information to track down Professor Castro and Bosco as leaders of the snuff ring. Chema and Ángela furthermore provide a ‘close visual reading’ of the quick jump cuts in post-production editing, which aim to delete the victim’s mention of her torturer’s name, allowing them to conclude that the victim knows her murderer. It could be argued that these two fundamental pieces of information, used to crack the case, are derived from the protagonists’ critical analysis of graphic images, providing a similar key to Amenábar’s proposal for his viewers to deconstruct their own relationship to violence with critical reflection. 

One should note that the word morbo used to describe Ángela’s ‘morbid’ desire to view extreme, violent images, is defined in Spanish as both ‘an unhealthy interest in persons or things’ and ‘an attraction to unpleasant events’. In this sense, the film’s dark reflection on spectatorship and the morbid fascination with explicit images in the media may be traced to the film’s release, contemporary to the upsurge in violence in Spanish cinema at the time, noted by Jordan and MorganTamosunas, Klodt, Moreiras-Menor and Tierney, among others, as well as the flourishing of the first private television networks in Spain in the 1990s. Summarised in the market-driven maxim of Professor Castro on the film industry, to provide viewers literally with what they most desire to see, programming in commercial television is largely dependent upon the number of viewers in a given audience share, supported by advertising spots (see Maxwell 1995). It is no surprise that Amenábar closes the film, then, with a sequence of images from a fictitious sensationalist news show, Justice and Law, whose anchor summarises the ‘unbelievable’ and ‘macabre’ story of gruesome murders of disappeared girls found on tape. Framing for her audience that it is ‘not easy for us to show these images,’ the anchor both conditions the viewer’s expectations before seeing the footage (‘and now, the images you’ve been waiting for’) and justifies the broadcast as ‘a document by itself’, unmediated and lacking critical analysis. In this final sequence, the camera shows Chema and Ángela walking through the hallway of a hospital, interspersed with images of patients fixated on the same television broadcast, a suggestive critique of a greater social desire to view violence in televised media, which is not altogether unique to Spain.5 Keeping in mind the film’s potential to question intimacy, vigilance, and the increasingly blurry distinction between the public and private – a more subtle gesture than the explicit nature of extreme violence in the film’s exploration of snuff – one could conclude in this final scene that Amenábar proposes a greater social critique of the production of and desire to consume images in a market-driven economy that jettisons ethical considerations in favour of audience share or box office revenue. In other words, the viewing audience most desires to consume, with morbid fascination, not only violence but voyeurism in which private matters are made public – the form of television programming that defines sensationalist news media and the gossip varieties of popular talk shows that turn the intimate details of private lives into spectacle-driven commodities for mass consumption. After all, perhaps summarised most disturbingly for the film’s viewers, when Ángela kisses the television screen, her secret desire for the assassin is only made public, terrifyingly and intriguingly so for the viewing audience, when caught on tape. 

Notes 

1. As Cristina Moreiras-Menor argues, ‘Lejos … de ser una película que trabaja exclusivamente en torno a la mirada fascinada del sujeto contemporáneo hacia la violencia, Tesis va más allá al exponer tanto su razón, la espectacularización masiva e indiferencia de la realidad, como su origen, la formación del sujeto y la manipulación de su mirada a la realidad a partir de procesos simbólicos de educación asentados fundamentalmente en estructuras de poder (institucionalizadas) que privilegian la espectacularización consumista del lado más sórdido de la naturaleza humana y social’ [Far … from being a film that works exclusively around the fascinated gaze of the contemporary subject towards violence, Tesis goes beyond this to expose both its raison d’être, mass spectacularization and indifference towards reality, and its origin, the formation of the subject and manipulation of the subject’s view of reality from symbolic processes of education seated fundamentally in (institutionalized) structures of power that privilege consumerist spectacularization of human and social nature’s most sordid side.] (Moreiras-Menor 2002: 260). 

2. See Dolores Tierney, ‘The Appeal of the Real in Snuff: Alejandro Amenábar’s Tesis (“Thesis”)’, Spectator – The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, Vol. 22, No. 2, Fall 2002, pp. 45–55. 

3. As Amenábar notes, ‘opté por el camino opuesto, mirando hacia el otro lado, a la cara de los actores, jugando con la proyección psicológica del espectador, con lo que no está viendo, con lo que se está imaginando’ [I chose the opposite route, looking the other way, at the actors’ faces, playing with the psychological projection of the viewer, with what one is not seeing, with what one is imagining.] (Marchante 2002: 59). 

4. See Dominique Russell, ‘Sounds like Horror: Alejandro Amenábar’s Thesis on AudioVisual Violence’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 81–95. 

5. See Jason E. Klodt, ‘En el fondo te gusta: Titillation, Desire, and the Spectator’s Gaze in Alejandro Amenábar’s Tesis’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2007, pp. 3–17. 

Cast and Crew:

[Country: Spain. Production Company: Las Producciones del Escorpión and SOGEPAQ. Director: Alejandro Amenábar. Executive producers: José Luis Cuerda and Emiliano Otegui. Screenwriters: Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. Cinematographer: Hans Burmann. Music: Alejandro Amenábar and Mariano Marín. Editor: María Elena Sáinz de Rozas. Cast: Ana Torrent (Ángela), Fele Martínez (Chema), Eduardo Noriega (Bosco Herranz), Xabier Elorriaga (Castro), Miguel Picazo (Figueroa), Nieves Herranz (Sena), Rosa Campillo (Yolanda).] 

Further Reading 

Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1998. 

Oti Rodríguez Marchante, Amenábar, vocación de intriga, Madrid, Páginas de Espuma, 2002. 

Steven Marsh and Parvati Nair (eds), Gender and Spanish Cinema, Oxford and New York, Berg, 2004. 

Rosanna Maule, ‘Cultural Specificity and Transnational Address in the New Generation of Spanish Film Authors: The Case of Alejandro Amenábar’, in Cristina Sánchez-Conejero (ed.), Spanishness in the Spanish Novel and Cinema of the 20th-21st Century, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2007, pp. 107–20. 

Richard Maxwell, The Spectacle of Democracy: Spanish Television, Nationalism, and Political Transition, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minneapolis Press, 1995. 

Cristina Moreiras-Menor, Cultura herida: Literatura y cine en la España democrática, Madrid, Ediciones Libertarias, 2002. 

Joan Ramon Resina (ed.), Burning Darkness: A Half Century of Spanish Cinema, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2008. 

Paul Julian Smith, Television in Spain, from Franco to Almodóvar, Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, New York, Tamesis, 2006. 

Source Credits:

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.

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Mpaa rating, produced by, thesis (1996), directed by alejandro amenábar.

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Directed by Alejandro Amenábar

My name is Angela. They're going to kill me.

While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student in her faculty...

Ana Torrent Fele Martínez Eduardo Noriega Xabier Elorriaga Miguel Picazo Nieves Herranz Rosa Campillo Paco Hernández Rosa Ávila Teresa Castanedo José Miguel Caballero Joserra Cadiñanos Julio Vélez Pilar Ortega Olga Margallo José Luis Cuerda Emiliano Otegui Walter Prieto Florentino Sainz Helena Castañeda

Director Director

Alejandro Amenábar

Producers Producers

José Luis Cuerda Alejandro Amenábar Hans Burmann Wolfgang Burmann Julio Madurga Emiliano Otegui María Elena Sáinz de Rozas Ricardo Steinberg

Writers Writers

Mateo Gil Alejandro Amenábar

Editor Editor

María Elena Sáinz de Rozas

Cinematography Cinematography

Hans Burmann

Assistant Director Asst. Director

Executive producers exec. producers.

Emiliano Otegui José Luis Cuerda

Production Design Production Design

Wolfgang Burmann

Composers Composers

Alejandro Amenábar Mariano Marín

Sound Sound

Pelayo Gutiérrez Nacho Royo-Villanova Ricardo Steinberg

Costume Design Costume Design

Makeup makeup.

Paca Almenara

Sogepaq Las Producciones del Escorpión S.L.

Releases by Date

11 apr 1996, 26 jun 1997, 22 nov 1997, 22 apr 2003, 07 oct 2009, releases by country.

• Physical 18

Netherlands

• Theatrical 16
• Physical 16 DVD

South Korea

• Theatrical 18

125 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by claudia 🦋 ★★★★½ 8

my chemical romance = mi romance con chema

Review by TheDayILetGo ★★★½ 8

La escena más surrealista de la película es cuando el Chema se ducha

Review by IllMakeYouLaugh ★★★½ 1

Chema? More like Chemistry. Plz kiss me film daddy

Review by kathleen ☆ *:･ﾟ ★★★★★ 1

i wish they had letterboxd

Review by NoCopZone ★★★½ 4

~𝖕 𝖚 𝖗 𝖊 𝖉 𝖗 𝖊 𝖆 𝖉~

straight men are scary, the movie.

do they want to fuck you or kill you? yes

Review by Lola ★★★★

incel vs chad: the movie

Review by Gio ★★★★½

You know she’s a film major when she has a My Own Private Idaho poster in her room

Review by ana ★★★★ 2

que el estereotipo de filmbro cinéfilo rancio indie pick me boy no haya cambiado en 30 años needs to be studied

Review by Picus💀 ★★★½

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

. 　。　　　　•　 　ﾟ　　。 　　.　　　.　　　 　　.　　　　　。　　 。　. 　.　　 。　 ඞ 。　 . • ° • Chema was not the Impostor. 。　. . 2 Impostors remaining 　 .　　。　　　　　　ﾟ　　　.　　　　　.

Review by Jacob ★★★★ 12

Los delirios de Alfred Hitchcock han perseguido a toda una generación de cineastas, algunos charlatanes y otros dignos sucesores pero Tésis de Almenábar es mucho más que esto último.

Es un nuevo y transmutado sentido del pánico en un misterio lleno de sensaciones inquietantes. Las pistas falsas, revelaciones dentro de las revelaciones, personajes ambiguos, secuencias ensordecedoras y tensión para romperte los dientes pues el director español es todo un maestro en la construcción de atmosferas opresivas a la hora de filmar, sobre todo en la obscuridad.

Donde las sombras y los rincones siempre están sugiriendo algo en la misma medida que el misterio maquina nuevas incógnitas, cada cual mas espeluznante que la anterior.

Pero dentro de todo el argumento nos…

Review by charlotte ★★★★

“You sound like the police” “Don’t insult me”

Chema, i have feelings for you 🥰

Review by AlexIndo ★★★★★ 1

¿𝖣𝖾 𝗊𝗎é 𝖼𝗈𝗅𝗈𝗋 𝗌𝗈𝗇 𝗆𝗂𝗌 𝗈𝗃𝗈𝗌?

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• Paco Hernández

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• #11 Best Spanish Movies of all time
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• "Alejandro Amenábar balances actual, terrifying visuals with Hitchcockian red herrings for one of the best debut films in years"  Jason Newman : Rolling Stone
• "Despite some whopping improbabilities 'Thesis' generates genuine tension"  Joe Leydon : Variety
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User history

Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.

While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student in her faculty…

The chilling first feature from the master of psychological thrillers, The Others director Alejandro Amenábar, examines society’s insatiable obsession with violent imagery. Located in the sleazy underworld of amateur snuff films, this tense, creepy campus-set thriller is rife with unsettling turns.

Snuff movies, true-crime TV shows and other forms of violent entertainment figure heavily in restrained thriller about a film student who becomes the star in her own life-or-death drama. Newcomer Alejandro Amenabar provides an inventive plot and a sufficient supply of red herrings. Could click in the international video market with savvy handling.

By Joe Leydon

Film Critic

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Snuff movies, true-crime TV shows and other forms of violent entertainment figure heavily in the plot of “Thesis,” a surprisingly restrained thriller about a film student who becomes the star in her own life-or-death drama. Newcomer Alejandro Amenabar provides an inventive plot and a sufficient supply of red herrings, but fails to sustain suspense in the pic’s draggy second half. Theatrical prospects are iffy. Even so, “Thesis” could click in the international video market with savvy handling.

Ana Torrent is well cast as Angela, a Madrid film student who wants to write her thesis on violence in movies. Her faculty adviser offers to help by searching the university’s archives for violent videos. Unfortunately, he wanders into a secret storage room and picks up an unmarked videocassette, and he’s shocked into a fatal heart attack while viewing the tape.

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Angela discovers her mentor dead in a university screening room. Impulsively, she steals the tape he was watching. At home, she discovers the video is a recording of the torture-murder of a co-ed who disappeared three years earlier.

Rather than alert the police, Angela decides to investigate on her own. She seeks info about violent video from an eccentric classmate, Chema (Fele Martinez), an avid fan of porno and splatter movies. He looks at the snuff video and immediately recognizes that it was shot with a special model of video camera. Just a few days later, Angela spots one of those cameras in the hands of a handsome student, Bosco (Eduardo Noriega), who just happens to know the long-missing co-ed.

Amenabar effectively develops a slow-simmering attraction between Angela and Bosco, slyly hinting that she may be drawn to him because of the danger he possibly represents. Meanwhile, Chema fumes jealously and does a great deal to arouse audience suspicion. Other prime suspects include Castro (Javier Elorriaga), Angela’s new faculty adviser; and Yolanda (Rosa Campillo), Bosco’s possessive girlfriend.

Despite some whopping improbabilities — would snuff movie producers really hide their master tapes in a university storage room? –“Thesis” generates genuine tension. Pic also manages a few pointed comments about the relationship between violence and voyeurism, particularly in a final scene that has the host of a Spanish tabloid TV show warning viewers that they’re about to see a clip from a snuff movie. The viewers appear to be raptly attentive.

Torrent manages the difficult trick of seeming intelligent even when her character does some pretty dumb things. Martinez is aptly ambiguous in his portrayal of the surly Chema.

Hans Burmann’s moody cinematography is a major asset. Other tech values are first-rate.

According to pic’s production notes, Amenabar is, at 23, the youngest feature filmmaker in Spain. It will be interesting to see whether he can fulfill the promise he displays here.

• Production: A Las Productions del Escorpion production. Produced by Jose Luis Cuerda. Executive producer, Emiliano Otegui Piedra. Directed, written by Alejandro Amenabar.
• Crew: Camera (color), Hans Burmann; editor , Maria Elena Saenz De Rozas; music, Amenabar, Mariano Marin; art direction, Wolfgang Burmann; sound (Dolby), Goldstein & Steinberg; assistant director, Walter Prieto. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (Panorama), Feb. 16, 1996. Running time: 125 MIN.
• With: Angela ... Ana Torrent Chema ...Fele Martinez Bosco ... Eduardo Noriega Sena ... Nieves Harranz Yolanda ... Rosa Campillo Figueroa ... Miguel Picazo Castro ... Javier Elorriaga

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• 1 Alejandro Amenabar Títulos Iniciales 1:26
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Need to watch ' Thesis ' on your TV, phone, or tablet? Tracking down a streaming service to buy, rent, download, or watch the Alejandro Amenábar-directed movie via subscription can be a huge pain, so we here at Moviefone want to do right by you. We've listed a number of streaming and cable services - including rental, purchase, and subscription choices - along with the availability of 'Thesis' on each platform when they are available. Now, before we get into the various whats and wheres of how you can watch 'Thesis' right now, here are some particulars about the Sogepaq, Las Producciones del Escorpión S.L. thriller flick. Released , 'Thesis' stars Ana Torrent , Fele Martínez , Eduardo Noriega , Xabier Elorriaga The movie has a runtime of about 2 hr 5 min, and received a user score of 74 (out of 100) on TMDb, which put together reviews from 782 respected users. What, so now you want to know what the movie's about? Here's the plot: "While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured to death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student at her college..." 'Thesis' is currently available to rent, purchase, or stream via subscription on Google Play Movies, Apple iTunes, and YouTube .

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‘being maria’ review: ‘last tango in paris’ star maria schneider gets a behind-the-scenes biopic that starts strong but fizzles out.

Anamaria Vartolomei ('Happening') plays the troubled French actress — alongside Matt Dillon as Marlon Brando — in Jessica Palud's film.

By Jordan Mintzer

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When New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wrote a long and heated rave of Bernardo Bertolucci ’s Last Tango in Paris after its premiere in 1972, she stated, among other things, that “this is a movie people will be arguing about for as long as there are movies.”

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The reasons for this are well known, and resurfaced over the past decade alongside the many #MeToo scandals that rocked the film world: For the infamous sequence in Last Tango in which Brando’s character, Paul, anally rapes Schneider’s character, Jeanne, using butter as a lubricant, the actress was never forewarned — the scene wasn’t in the original script — nor was she asked for consent. Brando and Bertolucci conspired to take her by surprise, and while the sodomy was simulated, the butter was real, and the entire humiliating experience would have a life-changing effect on Schneider.

Being Maria , directed by Jessica Palud ( Revenir ), who adapted the script from a book by Vanessa Schneider — a journalist for Le Monde and Maria’s niece — is built entirely around that pivotal incident, both for better and for worse. Like the actress herself, whose life and career exploded with Last Tango’s success while unraveling at the same time, the movie loses its way after the scandal surrounding Bertolucci’s film fizzles out.

Before then, Palud paints a convincing portrait of a young woman from a troubled background whose connection to the movies was more personal than professional. When we first meet Maria (the excellent Anamaria Vartolomei from Happening ), she’s on a film set admiring the work of her estranged father, the actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal), who abandoned her as a child.

Through the help of Daniel, Maria starts working as an actress, playing small roles in a handful of films. Soon she’s 19-years-old and sitting in a café opposite Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio), who’s decided to cast her in Last Tango , studying her like a caged tiger fascinated by its prey. Bertolucci fans beware: The director comes across here as a pompous and careless prima donna.

Brando (played quite convincingly by a heavily made-up Matt Dillon ) is much more charming and paternalistic, initially taking Maria under his wing to show her the ropes of his profession. In one early scene they shoot together, Maris admires how Brando manages to shed real tears on set, to which he responds: “I wasn’t acting.”

This comes back to bite Maria big time when we arrive at the rape scene and the actress is caught completely off-guard. She trusted both Brando and Bertolucci, but the two wanted her reaction to be so real that they deliberately failed to warn her. After the scene is in the can and Schneider storms off to cry in her dressing room, she’s forced to come back and shoot the second part of the sequence. Like a pro, she does it, and nobody apologizes to her. The best Brando can say is: “It’s only a film.”

The problem with the film is that that scene happens about a half hour in, after which we’re left with a downward and rather predictable spiral that fails to maintain our interest. We see Schneider losing it soon after Last Tango becomes a scandalous sensation — it received an X-rating in the U.S. and was legally banned in Italy, where all prints of the film were burned — partying all night long, dating a heroin addict and becoming one herself, nodding off on set and failing to remember her lines.

Vartolomei is a compelling actress and the camera truly loves her, but there’s only so much she can do with a script that doesn’t have much of a second or third act. Had Palud set the entire movie around the Last Tango shoot and its immediate aftermath, the drama would have perhaps been more compact. Instead, we’re left watching Maria dance in lots of nightclubs, go through withdrawal, get hospitalized, fall in love with a young film student (Céleste Brunnquell) doing a thesis on women in movies, and try to kick her habit for good. Plenty of stuff happens, but there’s no real arc to sustain the material.

Palud’s film asks us to contemplate whether art should always truimph over real people, using Maria Schneider’s sad true story as proof that certain things aren’t worth doing to make a “movie breakthrough.”

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'The Creator': Trailer, Cast, Plot and Everything You Need to Know

John David Washington stars in the post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi film.

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Gareth Edwards ' ( Rogue One ) next sci-fi adventure, The Creator, has made its way to theaters as of September 29th, 2023. Edwards' involvement, as well as a cast led by John David Washington ( Tenet ), have understandably turned a few heads. The film is a big-budget sci-fi blockbuster chronicling a post-apocalyptic war between humans and AI, a concept that some fear is becoming more real day by day. After gaining plenty of positive buzz at Disney's CinemaCon presentation back in April, many had been anxiously awaiting the release of the new sci-fi epic. Here is everything you need to know about The Creator .

The Creator

As a future war between the human race and artificial intelligence rages on, ex-special forces agent Joshua is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI. The Creator has developed a mysterious weapon that has the power to end the war and all of mankind. As Joshua and his team of elite operatives venture into enemy-occupied territory, they soon discover the world-ending weapon is actually an AI in the form of a young child.

The Creator premiered in theaters on September 29, 2023 . On this date, the film competed against Saw X , the tenth installment in Lionsgate's popular horror franchise, and Paramount's animated sequel PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie . The film was initially scheduled to release on October 6, 2023 .

Edwards expressed his gratitude for the film's release date, claiming that the film was coming out at the perfect time.

"We got lucky [with our release date]. I tried to avoid putting a date. I didn’t want to write a date for the movie because even [Stanley] Kubrick gets it wrong. At some point, you have to pick a date, so I did some math and I picked 2070. Now, I feel like an idiot because I should have gone for 2023, with everything that’s unfolded in the last few months, or year. It’s scarily weird. When we first pitched the movie to the studio, this idea of war with AI, everyone wants to know the backstory. They’re like, 'Hang on, why would we be at war with AI?' We were like, 'It’s been banned because it went wrong.' 'But why would you ban AI? It’s gonna be great.' There were all these ideas that you have to set up that, that maybe humanity would reject this thing and not be that cool about it. And the way it’s played out, the set-up of our movie, is pretty much the last few months."

The film had its world premiere at this year's Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, September 26 .

The Creator premiered exclusively in movie theaters starting on September 29 this year. However, since the film was distributed by 20th Century Studios, which is owned by Disney, the film will likely end up available to stream on Hulu, in December or early January. It was announced that the streaming service would be merged with Disney+ in a single app by the end of the year, so The Creator could serve as a launch title for the new app.

The Creator also got an IMAX release. This is great news for anyone even slightly versed with the work of Gareth Edwards, given his attention to vast sci-fi landscapes and gorgeous visuals, which lend themselves to a film fit for IMAX. For those who would prefer to watch the movie at home but don't want to wait for the streaming release, The Creator is currently available for digital rental and purchase at most online video stores. The film is also releasing in 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD formats starting on Tuesday, December 12, 2023.

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20th Century Studios' released the first official teaser trailer for The Creator on their YouTube channel on May 17, 2023 . Set to Aerosmith 's "Dream On," the trailer is filled with action, biblical references, and plenty of robots, as John David Washington's Joshua seeks to protect a young android girl from those who seek to destroy her.

While many have lauded the trailer's use of the Aerosmith classic, Edwards revealed that it wasn't his idea to include the song , in an interview with Collider's Perri Nemiroff he revealed:

Well, I can't take credit for it. It was Disney, so the whole Disney marketing machine. It was probably an editor, obviously. I don't know their name. This stuff gets presented to you when it's close to being ready, and you see a few different posters, you see some of the trailers and as a group decision, we hone in on something, and then you're allowed to change a couple of shots if it bothers you. They're very inclusive. I was worried it was the wrong choice. I just got paranoid about it.

Aerosmith. I love Aerosmith. I love that song, “Dream On.” But I was just kind of paranoid that somehow -- because it's not in the movie. And then I was completely wrong because everyone seemed to have a good reaction. And Steve Tyler owes me a Lamborghini now.

The second trailer for The Creator was released online on July 17, 2023 . The latest look at the film gives us a further look at the plot of The Creator, with Joshua being tasked to retrieve the robot's super-weapon, who happens to look like a precocious young girl.

A pair of 30-second spots were released by 20th Century Studios in August 2023, further delving into the rift between humans and AI in the film.

A behind-the-scenes featurette was also released shortly after, detailing Gareth Edwards' filmmaking process as well as clips of several of the stars of the film including Washington.

The final trailer for The Creator was released by 20th Century Studios on September 13, 2023, giving us our last good look at the film before it premieres at this year's Fantastic Fest.

Another featurette, titled "Meet the Creator" narrated by Edwards, was released on 20th Century Studios' YouTube channel on September 19, 2023.

Originally reported to be titled True Love , the title was later changed to The Creator . While speaking to Nemiroff, Edwards revealed that True Lov e was just a placeholder title , explaining:

"I mean, you have a working title when you make a film, and the most important day is the first day you're going to announce it to the world, stick it on a poster, any of that stuff. You just got to decide before then, like, is that the title? The whole time I was making this, my feeling was when you watch the movie, people who have seen it go, I see why you wanted to call it True Love , right? But ahead of going to see it, if you just go to some random person in the street and go, do you want to see a film called True Love ? They're like, "I'm not really into rom coms." You go, "It's not that!" I didn't want to spend my life having everyone come up to me going, “Oh my God, I just, I just saw True Love or whatever it was, and I didn't realize it was like that kind of movie.”

The Creator is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features a place where both humans and AI inhabit the planet. The official synopsis for the film via 20th Century Studios reads:

Amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, Joshua (Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war… and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory… only to discover the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child.

Also while talking to Nemiroff, Edwards talked about how the film explores concerns about AI, with the world within the film being divided into whether people embrace AI or fear it.

"Basically the movie was always like, the world is divided in two. Half the world has banned AI. They hate it. It's wrong. It caused some real big problems. And the other half of the movie's embraced it, carried on developing it to the point where it's now human-like. So it's kind of an east-versus-west situation at the start. And at the very beginning, it was like, “But why would you ban it?” Genuinely every single reaction to the screenplay was, “Why would anyone ban AI? It's this amazing thing." And so then I had to kind of invent a scenario where you might reject it, right? And weirdly now, the way things are going, it's like the default setting is ban it, and it's a strange reaction that we've all had to this technology. It's like this freaky mirror that, "Hang on. How can this ..." There's no one home but yet it seems so real."

Edwards also talked about how he ultimately decided on the film's setting and time period.

"I've made a mistake because I should have picked 2024, but I picked 2070 because I didn't want to make the mistake Kubrick made of 2001 not being true. So I was like, I'm gonna pick something way downstream, and now it’s like, “Oh god, it's probably next year.” There's certain things if you said like, "Okay, predict out of all these things -- jet packs, going to the moon, whatever -- what are the things that you think science fiction is gonna achieve in your lifetime?" I didn't really have AI as a definite. I thought we might land on Mars again maybe before I died."

Of course, the film cannot simply rely on the pulling power of Gareth Edwards's involvement. However, his announcement as being in charge of the project back in 2020 has played a part in securing the incredible plethora of talent that has indeed been cast in this film. Back in May 2021, it was announced that John David Washington would play the lead role in the film and he was later revealed as Joshua. It was also announced that Danny McBride ( The Righteous Gemstones ) and Benedict Wong ( Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ) would also be starring in the film, but the two actors eventually dropped out of the project, with Sturgill Simpson ( Killers of the Flower Moon ) and Ken Watanabe ( Godzilla ) taking over the roles with their characters having since been revealed to be named Drew and Harun. The rest of the cast of The Creator includes Academy Award winner Allison Janney ( I, Tonya ) as Howell, newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles as Alfie, Gemma Chan ( Eternals ) as Maya, Amar Chadha-Patel ( Willow ) as Omni, Sek-on, and Sergeant Bui, Marc Menchaca ( Ozark ) as McBride, Robbie Tann ( Mare of Easttown ) as Shipley, Ralph Ineson ( The Witch ) as General Andrews, Michael Esper ( The Outsider ) as Captain Cotton, Veronica Ngo ( The Old Guard ) as Kami, Ian Verdun ( Siren ) as Daniels, Daniel Ray Rodriguez ( Poker Face ) as Hardwick, Rad Pereira (Betty) as Lambert, Syd Skidmore ( Me Time ) as Bradbury, Karen Aldridge (Fargo) as Dr. Thankey, Teerawat Mulvilai ( Thirteen Lives ) as Boonme, and Leanna Chea ( Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom ) as Commander Daw.

It isn't just the cast that is pivotal to a film's success, and Gareth Edwards can't do it on his own. Luckily there is a great crew assembled for The Creator , including the likes of Academy Award winner Greig Fraser ( Dune ) and Oren Soffer ( Fixation ), who will be applying their fantastic experience as cinematographers to what is setting up to be a true visual treat. Fraser previously worked with Edwards on Rogue One . The story comes from Edwards, who then co-wrote the script alongside Academy Award nominee Chris Weitz ( Rogue One ). Academy Award winner Hans Zimmer ( Dune ) is composing the score for the film. Serving as editors on the film are Academy Award nominee Hank Corwin ( Don't Look Up ), Academy Award winner Joe Walker ( Dune ), and Scott Morris ( Armageddon Time ). Edwards also produced the film alongside Kiri Hart (Star Wars: Rebels), Jim Spencer ( Monsters ), and Academy Award nominee Arnon Milchan ( The Revenant ). Serving as executive producers on the film are New Regency's Yariv Milchan , Michael Schaefer , and Natalie Lehmann ( The Northman ) as well as Entertainment One's Nick Meyer and Zev Foreman ( Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves ).

Filming for The Creator began in January 2022.

Oren Soffer shared a post on Instagram announcing that filming had wrapped on May 30, 2022.

While Gareth Edwards’ filmography is still relatively small compared to some of his peers, he still boosts a solid body of work. He is great at directing action but also emotion. That blend of heart, humor, and spectacle sounds out. We can only hope that The Creator continues that trend. Here are three Gareth Edwards films you can watch right now.

Godzilla (2014) - Ford Brody ( Aaron Taylor-Johnson ), a Navy bomb expert, has just reunited with his family in San Francisco when he is forced to go to Japan to help his estranged father, Joe ( Bryan Cranston ). Soon, both men are swept up in an escalating crisis when Godzilla, King of the Monsters, arises from the sea to combat malevolent adversaries that threaten the survival of humanity. The creatures leave colossal destruction in their wake as they make their way toward their final battleground: San Francisco.

This retelling of the Godzilla legend is unique because of its slow build. Edwards takes a similar approach that Steven Spielberg did when crafting Jaws . The tension gets higher and higher as you wait for the monster to appear. Godzilla is not as action-heavy as its sequels, but it might be the better for it. The film is still a fantastic watch.

Rent/Purchase on Prime Video

Monsters (2010) - NASA discovered a few years ago the real possibility of alien life, and consequently, a probe was set up and launched in order to collect samples. After crashing during the re-entry over Central America, new life forms began to appear and spread rapidly. Half of Mexico is quarantined as an infected zone. In this context, we follow the story of a US journalist escorting his boss's daughter through this area to the United States.

Monsters asks us to look within ourselves and question how we’d react when faced with such a terrifying situation. It’s a tightly made movie that focuses on what the world would look like when faced with an extraterrestrial threat.

Watch on Peacock

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) - Set just before the events of Star Wars: A New Hope , Rogue One: A Star Wars Story follows a new ragtag group of rebels as they rush to stop the Empire from creating a weapon of mass destruction.

The film is based around stealing the Death Star plans, and that makes it a great backdrop. It’s set during an era fans are familiar with, but Rogue One manages to tell a great tale of the ‘others.’ Before Luke gave the resistance new hope, this group of fighters made it possible. It’s a dirty, grounded fight that was a breath of fresh air. Edwards was able to make Star Wars feel fresh and exciting while still remembering where the franchise started.

Watch on Disney+