Maybe you find that challenging, or intimidating, or mind-numbing, or somewhere between all three. If so, I’m not exactly sweetening the pot if I tell you that the film is a series of oblique, poetic tableaux vivants that symbolically illustrate the inner and outer life of the 18th century Armenian […]
Russia
S15E13 – Flamethrower Cooking With Elon Musk
It’s time to join Rob and Andy for more news-based shenanigans from the realms of science and technology, and we’re kicking things of this week with some recycling … … on the Moon After that it’s all systems go with potential holodeck technology, stupidity causing smartphone batteries to explode, Germany’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Other Works by Dziga Vertov (Review)
Hard to be a God (2015) A difficult, dirty, violent epic of a swansong (Review)
The world feels like a brutal, unsentimental place after watching Aleksei German’s final film, not least when I had the following realisation: Hard to be a God’s ceaseless, grotesque phantasmagoria of cruelty makes German the only director who could possibly adapt Cormac McCarthy’s classic novel Blood Meridian. But now he’s […]
