Nosferatu (October 6th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[NOSFERATU screens Friday October 6th at 9:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Live musical accompaniment by The Invincible Czars.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

For those who don't already know, F.W. Murnau's silent horror classic NOSFERATU is in reality a very thinly disguised and very much unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'. Stoker's heirs were not pleased and tried to have every copy of the film destroyed, but like any good movie monster NOSFERATU managed to rise from the grave. It is now considered one of the undisputed classics of the horror genre, one of those films that film historians and critics will tell you that you simply have to see in order to have an appreciation for the development of cinematic art, blah, blah, blah. And they're right, of course, but that's not why you should watch it. You should watch NOSFERATU because, even at almost a century old, it's still fun to watch.

Faust (February 18th and 19th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[FAUST screens Saturday February 18th at 5:15 pm and Sunday February 19th at 8:35 pm]

Review by Matt Finley

I'm not suggesting that director F.W. Murnau had, himself, entered a Faustian pact with some soul-scrounging demonic pawn broker in exchange for cinematic prowess, but, damn was he fantastic. Just four years after immortalizing the undead in 1922's NOSFERATU, Murnau tackled an even better known, and much older, story of mortal man's perpetual cage match with the forces of darkness. In FAUST, however, the dark, poisoned heart that thumps ripe for the staking is the same one that fuels the story's protagonist: the heart of man. With bombastic special effects and a masterful ability to capture the dramatic spectacle of myth at both ends of its scope - the achingly human and the magically sublime - Murnau's FAUST is not just a powerful film, but also a definitive telling of one of mankind's most enduring and inescapable tragedies, a story of human greed and the lengths a person will go to indulge his hunger for power.