British documentarian Mark Littlewood stages scenes from George Orwell’s life, emphasizing his heroism during the Spanish Civil War, and from his fiction, including the torture of the hero in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with Orwell’s texts as voice-over. I’m sufficiently interested in the left-wing novelist and essayist to find any account of his life absorbing, but this 2003 film is so reductive that even I have to admit the same 54 minutes might be better spent reading or rereading his work. (JR)