Best movie ever!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

While writing her thesis about violence as entertainment, film student Ángela (Ana Torrent) stumbles upon a genuine snuff movie and, instead of notifying the police (as would most sane individuals), proceeds to investigate with the help of hardcore horror fan Chema (Fele Martínez), putting both of their lives in danger in the process.I find the whole phenomena of the snuff movie to be utterly fascinating: even though there has never been any concrete evidence that such a thing exists, the mere idea of someone filming torture and murder for the benefit of a paying audience chills my bones. Tesis, from Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar (The Others), is a decent enough thriller, but it deals with its deviant subject matter in such an anodyne fashion—Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Murder Tape—that I can't help but think of it as something of a missed opportunity, lacking in seediness and degeneracy, suffering from a lack of logic (I lost count of how many time I shouted 'call the police!' at my TV), and proffering a weak observation about human nature: as a race, we're curious about violence until we face it in real life.For now, I'll have to be content in the knowledge that Joel Schumacher's 8mm ticks most of the boxes of what I want from a snuff themed thriller, not least Nic Cage at his most entertaining and a hulking bruiser in a gimp mask called Machine.

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...I've been wanting to watch this film for a couple of years now, but was hard to tract it down until it was finally available to rent on Netflix. To my disappointment, I should have not even bothered. The film has an intriguing theory about our society's attraction for the morbid, but it just didn't have that powerful impact it needed for it to be effective. Thesis was way too slow and took too long to get to the action. It has some suspenseful and atmospheric scenes that play off our fears of the dark and the unknown, but few and far between. For having a subject matter like this, the film was just not terrifying enough, but definitely a lot more intelligent than most thrillers that get released to theaters these days.The acting was very subtle and focused and Ana Torrent makes for an engaging lead as Angela, a student who stumbles upon a Snuff film while doing a thesis about violence. She figures out that the victim in the video was also a student in her faculty that went missing. Angela does some of her own investigation while the killer or killers is on her tail. The film was filled with an uneasy feeling that crawls under your skin, but never leads to anywhere haunting to make you lose sleep over. The characters where also not that interesting other than the lead actress and made some pretty weak decisions, which made me yell at the screen. Nothing that amazing here, just decent.Director, Alejandro Amenábar best known from the modern horror classic The Others. He definitely likes to inject his pictures with atmosphere, suspense, character, and story and fear the old fashioned way than relying on CGI and bloodshed. For this being his first feature, it's not half bad and pretty gripping, but has pacing issues. I can tell though that he is in his element here and was in his element in The Others, so I hope that we get another thriller or horror movie in the future from him, as he seems to be the most skillful in those genres.Overall, It's not a must see and not for all tastes, but for its time it's kind of a one of a kind thriller and I would of probably appreciated it more if I watched it when it came out in 1996. Watching it now though, some of it just came off as a made for TV. movie and clocking in at 125 minutes, the film took too long to get going. Worth a look if you have nothing better to watch and if you were a fan of 8MM, but don't expect a fast paced thrill ride. 6 out of 10

"Thesis" by director Alejandro Amenábar is interesting movie. The first part builds up suspense well. Angela is doing an examination paper at film school in Madrid. She wants to explore why is death and killing so fascinating to so people. She teams up with another student called Chema, who is pathologically obsessed with violence. They discover snuff movie that shows a young woman torture horribly and killed. When they find out it was actually a student at the university, things take more drastic turn into the morbid. While the first half was done fairly gd the second part of the movie was a big disappointment. It moved at a snail's slow pace and was far too seedy to be enjoyable to my taste, even if the point is that maybe we should not explore these types of things past certain limits. I would have rate this higher, but the movie took a turn for the worse. If you into snuff movie analysis, this is probably worth a look, otherwise stay away.

What a terrific film. It scares the hell out of me every time I watch it. It's cleverly made, and the subject matter is one of terrifying myth. We all like to think that because we've never seem a snuff film, they don't exist, but they probably do, and if we really want to, and if we scour the planet for years, we'll probably find at least one. So, they're out there, and the premise in this film is that the next one could star you! I thought the script was solid, and the acting was superb. Not many films manage to scare me, but this one certainly did. All the factors were more than decent, and thus contributed to a wonderful film, full of surprises and suspense.