Heart of Darkness. The 1993 Nicholas Roeg film of it for British television. Pretty good, really, although I'm not sure about John Malkovich as Kurtz. He comes across as sort of a burnout, albeit a smart one, a visionary of a sort, and mad. But not charismatic. Someone said he must have been playing against Brando's version of the character, that he wanted to come across as nothing like him. (Come to think of it, the time I saw A Streetcar Named Desire at the Cleveland Play House the actor playing Stanley most certainly had the same idea.) I don't think Malkovich was a total disaster and he had a tough act to follow in Brando. Still, I think Dennis Hopper might have been better in the role. Speaking of Hopper, when I recognized characters, a lot of times that recognition was in terms of the Apocalypse Now versions of them rather than the ones from the book. Even though I've read the book three or four times. As Mailer said to Mikal Gilmore, films have a certain authority that dreams do not. Maybe that also applies, in certain cases, and depending on the viewer/reader, to characters on a page.
If Malkovich's Kurtz seemed uncharismatic to me, maybe that tracks with life, if not necessarily with art or with good artistic practice. That is, maybe it's just me. Neither Hitler nor a certain Hitlerite/Hitleresque thug, now a convicted felon, seem to me to have ever had a charismatic cell, a charismatic atom, in their entire beings. But they did or do know how to press ignorant and frightened people's buttons. The horror, the horror...