AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) "Genuine" or, in the longer version, "Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire" is a German movie from 1920, so it soon has its 100th anniversary. It is still silent and, even more obvious, in black-and-white. Director Robert Wiene and writer Carl Mayer have worked (together) on a couple more fairly famous silent film classic, especially "Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari", which also came out in 1920. Their effort with "Genuine", however, seems quite forgettable to me. The vampire did look scary I must admit and we have to give them thumbs-up because this was actually done before Nosferatu, bit still the action, story and acting were just not too interesting. There are 2 versions out there, a long one that runs for almost 90 minutes and a 44-minute version, the one I watched. Actually, I only found the short version. But I am perfectly fine with it as, like I wrote before, this was a mediocre film at best and **/***** is almost still a generous rating. No need to watch another 45 minutes of it. I do not recommend "Genuine", a genuinely uninteresting film,

Dalbert Pringle Regardless of this silent-era picture now being almost 100 years old, it's still not worth more than a 2-star rating, in my books.Believe me, this German export was pretty bloody awful (even when I took into account it being a product of cinema's by-gone days).For one thing - Had the leading actress, Fern Andra (who played the title character, Genuine) been even marginally attractive, then, yes, that would've certainly helped this nonsensical film at least rise above its sub-par mediocrity.But this actress (with her frizzy hair and bug eyes) had to be one of the absolute, most dog-ugly dames imaginable, regardless of the era of fashion that she represented.It's especially when you take into consideration that the Genuine character was supposed to be an irresistible seductress (aka. vamp-ire), where all the men were literally falling head-over-heels in love with her (and actually quite willing to commit murder, if she so commanded) that her decidedly cheap and somewhat creepy looks rendered her (along with the rest of the movie) as being repulsive rather than attractive.Besides not being even slightly entertaining (even from a nostalgic point of view), I found this moldie-oldie, with its ridiculously exaggerated acting, to be nothing but a stale, old joke told in very bad taste.Thank goodness this film only had a running time of just 43 minutes.

Cineanalyst The same director, cinematographer and writer of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" made this subsequent picture, "Genuine". Likewise, it is also an Expressionist film (one of the few made during Weimar Germany, contrary to what Lotte Eisner and the use by some of "expressionism" as an umbrella term for almost all German cinema of the period might suggest). Additionally, similar to "Caligari", the main body of "Genuine" is framed as a dream. Yet, I wasn't engulfed into the universe of "Genuine", as I was with "Caligari".The story, although just as peculiar, isn't as involving, which is unfortunately probably, in part, because the Kino release is only a condensed version. The framing of scenes is just as prosaic and theatrical as that in "Caligari"--if not more so. As well, the stylized acting seems more overdone and obtrusive this time. But, more importantly, the problem is the sets, which I can't see the entire version improving much upon. The Expressionist set designs are equally strange, with odd angels and geometric shapes. The production, however, leaves too much space open and unfilled, which is the largest reason that "Genuine" isn't as involving, or captivating, as "Caligari".

Levana Robert Wiene repeats the techniques he used in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" with far less success in "Genuine". His looming architectures and broad swaths of darkness are glaringly at odds with the utterly ridiculous story of the seductress-priestess-wild girl brought to unsuspecting Europe. There are some striking visual effects, such as the jungle of branches where Genuine climbs up and up to escape from her prison, but they don't add up to anything. (I should note that only fragments, adding up to about a half hour, survive of this movie; but I suspect that the parts I didn't see wouldn't have added any deeper meaning.)