Following his stint in the Spanish-language anthology film, 7 Days in Havana which was undertaken by several filmmakers and actors from the golden boy, Benicio del Toro to Emir Kusturica. Pablo Trapero returns to the director’s chair with a kaboom in The Clan, Argentina’s entry for the Best Foreign Language […]
Curzon Artificial Eye
The Sacrifice (1986) Tarkovsky’s Acutely Intelligent Swansong (Review)
Released just six months before his death from cancer, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is commonly held to be an uncomfortably elegiac, melancholy note for the great director to bow out on, which considering the rest of his films were hardly Duck Soup is saying something. In tackling the central threat […]
Nostalgia (1983) Diving into Tarkovsky’s Deep End (Review)
Curzon Artificial Eye releases the penultimate film from Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography in Nostalgia. Post-Stalker, Tarkovsky planned to make “The First Day” – a film that would interrogate atheism in the Soviet Union. Long story short. He had a major confrontation with Goskino (USSR committee for cinematography) whereby the half-finished film […]
Stalker (1979) Tarkovsky’s Infamous & Unfettered Artistic Vision (Review)
Solaris got the remake, Andrei Rublev got the Vatican’s thumbs-up, and Mirror famously caused Lars von Trier to declare Andrei Tarkovsky was God. But the biggest cultural footprint of all the Russian director’s seven feature films undoubtedly belongs to Stalker. His adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic has inspired a […]
Solaris (1972) Full of complex ideas and emotions, must be seen at least once (Review)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s third film, following his chilling debut Ivan’s Childhood and the mammoth Andrei Rublev, Solaris is a film that is more about experience and environment than enjoyment or leisure. Clocking in at 2 hours and 40 minutes, this science-fiction voyage into the human soul is anything but fun and […]
Andrei Rublev (1966) One of the greatest historical epics ever made (Review)
Following on from Ivan’s Childhood, Curzon Artificial Eye continues their retrospective on Russian Grandmaster Andrei Tarkovsky with Andrei Rublev. The second feature from Russia’s most celebrated film export follows the titular fifteenth-century iconographer as he walks the lands – starting when he is young and idealistic and ending 3 hours […]
Mustang (2015) a timeless debut of rare and bullish brilliance (Review)
Prisons aren’t just buildings to house and punish those who have wronged society, they can also be a psychological and social construct, the flexibility of this notion has seen it bend and twist into one of fiction’s most well-travelled concepts. As far as cinema is concerned, the path well-travelled begins […]
Ivan’s Childhood (1962) Once you’ve seen it, you won’t want to live in a world without it (Review)
Film history tends to invite less counterfactual speculation than military or political history, but here’s one for you: what if Ivan’s Childhood, now reissued by Curzon Artificial Eye, had never been made? Because that really did come close to happening. During production, source author Vladimir Bogomolov rejected a draft of […]
Our Little Sister (2015) The generous, life-affirming heart of Modern Japanese cinema (Review)
Victoria (2015) The German Crime film that cracked the “one-take” nut (Review)
Even as far back as 1948, the one-take film was aspiration with Hitchcock’s Rope. An endeavour similar to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman or Gustavo Hernández’s The Silent House, both he and Hitchcock used the practice of clean plates, filming areas or objects featuring no actors or moving objects to cut […]