At The Movies: Daniela Forever an inventive fable, gripping true story unfolds in September 5 (2025)

Daniela Forever (M18)

118 minutes, opens on April 17
★★★☆☆

The story: After his girlfriend dies in an accident, Nicolas (Henry Golding) enrols in a clinical sleep trial for an experimental drug that restores Daniela (Beatrice Granno) to him through lucid dreams.

Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo last had American actress Anne Hathaway battling a kaiju in the science-fiction comedy Colossal (2016).

His idiosyncratic cinema is never mere whimsy, though.

Daniela Forever is a post-mortem romance set and shot in Madrid, where Nicolas is an expatriate British deejay. It gets more troubling the deeper Nicolas inhabits the full-coloured nocturnal slumberland he creates with his medicated subconscious. The mournings after, which Vigalondo filmed using Betamax video technology in 4:3 aspect ratio, are desaturated and dispiriting by contrast.

It is not enough to have Daniela back, cosying up in their apartment and exploring the city together. Nicolas manipulates her thoughts and emotions to conform to his idea of their relationship, and remixes her memories.

There will be consequences for messing with the treatment. Plus the unforeseen complications of Daniela evolving from dream girl into a character of her own, who rekindles her affair with her ex-lover Teresa (Aura Garrido).

Golding is clever casting. It turns out that even the British-Malaysian charmer from the hit romantic comedy film Crazy Rich Asians (2018) can have controlling behaviour.

But who is to say what one in grief would or would not do to cope with loss? Golding shows Nicolas’ bereavement, as well as his fear knowing he will eventually have to wake up to reality.

Hot take: Till death do us part? Not in this fable on possessive love that is inventive and feels personal.

September 5 (NC16)

95 minutes, available on Apple TV+
★★★★☆

The story: During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, the Palestinian militia Black September breached the athletes’ village, taking the Israeli team hostage. America’s ABC Sports network was on site for the Games and pivoted to covering the unfolding tragedy over 17 fateful hours. It was the first live telecast of a terrorist act, watched by 900 million people worldwide.

Scottish documentarian Kevin Macdonald examined Germany’s security failure in One Day In September (1999), while Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood thriller Munich (2005) tracked Israel’s covert Operation Bayonet to avenge the massacre.

September 5 is unconcerned with such politics. The 2025 Academy Award Best Original Screenplay nominee by Swiss director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum is purely a detailed procedural about the making of a watershed moment in broadcast history from a single control room of suffocating tension.

Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) is the programming president jockeying for scoops, Geoff Mason (John Magaro) the inexperienced producer thrust into crisis reportage, and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) the operations chief.

Their German translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch) is the one fictional creation amid the striking verisimilitude of the movie’s 16mm film stock down to the vintage tape spools and walkie-talkies.

ABC’s original archival footage is furthermore montaged into suspenseful re-enactments of the crew members in their studio running on panicky adrenaline, editorial instinct and stale coffee as they debate not only the logistics of their assignment, but also the ethics: not how to get their analogue cameras closer to the action but whether they should, knowing lives are hanging in the balance.

The actors are outstanding. They bring pressing gravity to their courageous, fallible characters’ every decision between moral probity and professional duty.

Hot take: Today’s devalued media has much to learn from this gripping true story on journalistic integrity.

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