9 Criminally Underrated 2013 Films You Probably Missed
8. The Act Of Killing
Important films are often rejected by audiences as being somehow less entertaining than disposable thrills and engaging story-lined, and regardless of how critically acclaimed they are (and The Act Of Killing pulled an almost perfect score) the simple fact is that the nature of the beast means that a fraction of an audience who will see a Transformers movie will go and seek out any doc. Part of that also comes down to ticket sales and marketability - Cineworld are unlikely to give a documentary like The Act Of Killing the same sort of screening life as the latest animation, even if it's a million miles ahead in terms of quality - because audiences will be duped into thinking its a Sly Stallone actioner, and we'll see another debacle like the idiots who went to see The Artist and walked out complaining it was silent. But documentaries like this deserve more audiences, to match their universal acclaim. Critical success is one thing, but it should matter more to a politicised film for as many people (and not just the most verbose) to see it. This film reenacts a particularly bleak part of Indonesian history in which thousands were killed, with film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer inviting two of the leading killers to re-enact some of the killings. The result is ferociously affecting, and utterly nightmarish, with an unlikely pay-off when a killer is invited to play the part of one of his victims. Why You Didn't See It Documentaries naturally end up with less viewing figures than anything starring real life explosions and massive A-Listers, regardless of how worthy or important they are, and unfortunately for such film-makers those latter terms themselves can be deemed an impediment to mainstream success. As long as documentaries are picked up by niche broadcasters like BBC 4 in the UK, they will not have the sort of saturation they deserve, despite the vehement approval of that committed micro-audience. The Act Of Killing deserved to transcend its medium, but it was never, ever going to.
