Reviews

It's a vivid mix of Vaclav Vorlicek, Russ Meyer, Pedro Almodovar with a splash of Vera Chytilova and Kira Muratova. An incredible delight in bad taste! Baroque kitsch! A cascade of images!

The film has slow-motion, homoeroticism, piranhas, fake plants, shrill disco music and drink driving in a sports car. The film mixes the sexual excess of Almodovar with the fantastical inventive silliness of Vorlicek. It is a radical postmodern piece worthy of Chytilova and Muratova with a brave, political commentary typical of both women.

I won't reveal the plot. It is delightful in its bizarre zigzagging. It possesses a strange internal logic where each unexpected turn of events seems natural.

Dusa Pockaj, the aunt, is incredible! She reminds me of so many insolent European women bursting with life and irreverence.

It is an elegy of smut, filth, decadence and madness!

How the hell are smaller European cinemas hiding such stunning works? The Stone Cross, Vilarinhos das Furnas, L'Homme au Crâne Rasé. Why are post-Yugoslav cinemas sitting on masterpieces without promoting them? Valley of Peace for Slovenia, Frosina and Wolf's Night for Macedonia, The Tough Ones for Serbia, H-8 for Croatia and The Life of a Shock Force Worker for Bosnia. How many more are waiting to be rediscovered? How could we have imagined European cinema without these gems?

A painfully underrated short. It subtly contains much of what makes Angelopoulos so fascinating.

The premise is unclear... and to reveal it would give the game away. But the question is here: what is an ideal man? What is the ideal man in a Greece that is divided by class? Western facing vs. Traditional Greeks? What is an ideal man in an increasingly individualistic society? Is the "traditional" man nothing more than an identityless individual? Something to be elevated by the upper class, Westernised, trendy, urban Greek youth?

Angelopoulos already has this "something". A heaviness, a calm European existence where the world seeps into you. A calm humility towards the world around you. A world of senses and textures. In Voyage to Cythera, an audition is held to find the right actor for the father. An audition for the man who can say "it's me" the correct way. Both self-confident and self-effaced at once.

This aesthetic contrasts with the beginning: a rapid and flowing cinéma direct style, filled with audio contamination. It is filled with speech, with words. Much of it is hesitation and emptiness. It will return at the end, morphed by Angelopoulos' style.

There is something of an inter-colonial view. Something present in La Palisiada and Calle Mayor: a discomfort with an antiquated European self. A cultural cringe towards traditions and old ways of being. In 1967, a fascist coup will capitalise on these feelings and an over exulted, fake traditional Greece will be "revived".

Broadcast seems to answer that we should appreciate and cherish ourselves and our heritage. Angelopoulos is firmly Greek and modern. The ordinary Greek man is an object of empathy and identification more than the yuppies who look at the world without seeing it.

Smarmy, self-congratulatory, necrophilic oddity. A typical ruscist film where time and again, we have "our ancestors would have done the same" and "our enemies are all the same". It took two writers to write this.

Chapaev died and became a sordid plaything for Soviet propaganda. For this short, he is resurrected a second time. Much of Muscovy's cannon fodder shall remain where they fell, neither Mosfilm nor Lenfilm shall resurrect them. The irony is that Stalin slaughtered many Lenin era communists. Had Chapaev survived, he probably would have been shot or sent to Siberia. But Chapaev is among those saints who died before the Purges and who remained unblemished.

Furmanov, the author of Chapaev was already dead. He is now famous for eulogising the man who ploughed his wife.

Stalin was Hitler's ally until he got backstabbed in 1941. The film foully meanders about Soviets being denied their glorious lifestyle by their foes. And what of Baltic people, Poles, Ukrainians, Rusyn and Romanians, murdered, tortured, dispossessed in 1939?

Truly nothing changes: Muscovy attacks and plays victim.

This film has been viciously pummelled on IMDB by trolls. Why? Because the director made a separate film about a trans child (20 000 species of Bees). As such, I wanted to give this film a chance.

It is not the pinnacle of cinema. It isn't anything new. It is the story of a moral dilemma of a female choir who must decide between accepting or refusing the funding of a chemical plant. The plant pollutes the town and people are dying.

The film's themes are implicit: the erosion of community by individualistic capitalism, the death of democracy under capitalism, systemic failure, the moral and social dispossession under economic liberalism.

It is a well crafted film. A defiant, proud little picture. Proudly feminine, proudly Basque, dedicated to ordinary people. This film is a gift to everyday people and it being targeted is a sad sight.

The modernity, imagination and psychology present in this film surprised me. For those unfamiliar with 1940s and 1950s British cinema, much of it is quite conventional and most characters follow archetypes. At the time, British cinema lagged behind French cinema.

This film also has archetypal characters to a degree, but focuses on children and disability in a unique way. It has strong women and incredible directing of actors. So much of the film hinges on displaying realisations and moral questioning, wordless reactions. It hinges on people changing and evolving. The film has a real sense of humanity and vulnerability.

It has a delicate visual flair, a use of space and lighting. Two round lights bouncing off a pair of glasses. A child running through a large, wide empty hallway filmed with a short focal length. A wisp of smoke trailing over a face through a dissolve.

Phyllis Calvert deserved more recognition for her acting and didn't have the career she deserved. Mandy Miller's subtle, vulnerable performance for a child actress is a rare feat. Jack Hawkins is stunning as ever. It pains me that Alexander Mackendrick's directing didn't flourish. Mandy and The Lady Killers showed he could have been an interesting voice in modernist, New Wave cinema in the 60s. Unfortunately, his career was in turmoil by the late 50s. At the very least, we can cherish what he made at the summit of his craft.

I hate writing reviews. I am racked with doubt whenever I write a positive review. However, I feel compelled since this film is truly under-appreciated.

Armenian cinema is barely known. Unrestored, untranslated and over-shadowed by Muscovy's crushing imperialism, this film and many like it are forgotten outside of Armenia.

This is a film that is haunted by the past, that bitter pain present in many great films by Satyajit Ray (The Music Room, Charulata). It is a film that contains stunning shots. The music is worthy of 400 Coups (Jean Constantin) or Cléo de 5 à 7 (Michel Legrand). The film however marries baroque, pristine imagery and divine music in a way that echoes Pakeezah, Hitchcock or Korean melodramas (whether Early Rain, Lady Vengeance or The Housemaid). I do not want to unveil the plot. It is a construct that must be discovered with fresh eyes.

The film has at its heart, the fragility of myths. It is an echo to cinema. An echo to a struggle between the traditional and the personal, between beliefs and desire. How the petty desires of people collide with the great, the mysterious and the eternal.

But this is not the greatest film ever made, sadly.

Though some shots are pure magic, worthy of the best of Mizoguchi, and though the music is heart stopping, the characters seem shallow. The impenetrability of the characters and the suddenness of events, at times a lapidary tone, dull the emotional impact. It seems its relations to myths and legends force upon the film this legendary feel. The feeling of a distant tale from another time. The film brought me to tears, but it may have benefitted from a longer runtime.

Lapidary is a word that encapsulates this film. Both sudden and disarming, but also literally "of stone". As with many Armenian films, the mineral world lives and the transience of life is omnipresent.

Touching, moving and unflinching.

A heart-breaking fragment of the pain, suffering and mass death brought on by Soviet genocide.

A touching tribute to Lithuanian pride. We must not forget our fellow Europeans who were colonised and slaughtered.

Excellently shot with a digital camera. The collision between the mundane and the horrific is captivating. The seeping in of violence into every day life and communal identity is starkly expressed in this film. A real insight into the experience of colonised people around the world.

I suggest "From the Gulag Archipelago" by Jozef Gebski and "In the Crosswind" by Martti Helde.

This imperfect film is a testament to a generation of European and Muscovian journalists murdered or broken by Muscovian imperialism. Cruelty that the West, Europe especially, turned a blind eye to. No punishment for the slaughter of civilians, little children, journalists and activists.

It is a portrait of brave journalists and the heinous crimes of Muscovy in Chechnya and Georgia. Agonisingly reminiscent of Muscovian crimes in Ukraine over a hundred years; crimes stretching from the Circassian Genocide, the Muscovian bombing of Syria and the current phase of the genocidal invasion of Ukraine.

It is a clumsy questioning of war and violence from a man whose earnestness humanises the film and earns sympathy. His European English and the presence of European tongues (Georgian, French, Italian) and British English make this film familiar to me as a European. His film makes him seem passive, but also it renders him relatable to us and as such, he brings a presence, a reality to the horrific imagery of brutality in Chechnya and Georgia. Images that should have been taken seriously as a genocidal Muscovy edges deeper and deeper into Europe.

The film is somewhat let down by the focus on "why do war correspondents go to war?". It takes a pseudo apolitical stance of "war is bad" and ends with the shameful line "if you go to war, war will come home with you". I found that grossly inappropriate: I live with refugees in a Western European country, they have lost homes, loved ones, limbs. I never went to war looking for "adventure" and yet war came to me as war came to Kvatashidze in 2008.

Also, the film doesn't offer any insight into a Georgia partially occupied and surrounded by Muscovian wars in Georgia, Ukraine, Chechnya and Syria. He can only offer an "Oh dear" at it all. His film turns wars, victims and the weak against the powerful into a personal inconvenience for reporters. His answer is evasion or escapism even as war blights his homeland.

The film is tone deaf and interesting. Alex Kvatashidze's mediocre narration inserts a mediocre person into these scenes of horror. Alex is an average person that we have all met once in our lives. He isn't an incredibly brave war reporter. He isn't an intellectual or an activist with moral convictions. He is a frustrating man who both impoverishes the film and elevates it with his presence. He makes the film a jarring mess that is hard to coherently sum up.

Joris Ivens is a great figure in documentary cinema, but this is just a dull, repetitive and misleading Socialist Realist propaganda piece. 35mm.online offers far greater Polish documentaries and if you must see a Stalin era Polish film director, make it Tadeusz Makarczynski. A Valparaiso is a far superior film by Ivens.

I really don't know what to say... If you know socialist realist cinema, then there is nothing else to present: the enemy is bad, we are always good, we can achieve the absurdly impossible and a painfully didactic repetition of themes. The film is simple, shallow propaganda with very little in the way of entertainment value, visual experimentation or intellectual depth.

Do yourself a favour and stay away from this film.

Maybe you are familiar with this one: Russia had hope in the early 90s and that hope faded. Despite Yeltsin and Gorbachev's best efforts, Russia became a bloodthirsty dictatorship.

This is a tasteless lie in this context. Curtis offers one of his weakest works at the worst possible time. His exposé on 85 to 99 is skin deep. Gorbachev whipping up ethnic hatred in Vilnius is absent. The Alma Ata, Tbilisi and Latvian killings are downplayed or absent. The meteorological engineering that kept Chornobyl radiation in Ukraine and Belarus is absent. Yeltsin invading and occupying Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia goes unmentioned. We are given the image of Russia sliding into the war in Chechnya and yet prior wars are absent.

Rashism, Russian fascism, has been present from Tsarist times till today. Curtis, who has offered such in depth explorations of the Western psyche with Can't Get You Out of My Head and The Century of The Self fails to offer anything but a catalogue of miseries hitting Russia. He presents a story akin to lost innocence and lost hope, but in reality Russia remained an outwardly aggressive, violent, rashist nation. Curtis has offered us an irrelevant documentary for understanding Russia today. Nothing was gained nor learnt from this era. As ever Russian history is written as a story of victimhood that Curtis does not question. Why did the Russian people stay quiet during ethnic cleansings in Abkhazia and Transnistria? Why does Curtis not explore racial hierarchy within Russia? Why is Russian nationalism not explored when it is so relevant to the war in Chechnya or figures such as Zhirinovsky and Putin? What of the anti-humanist ideology present in Russia that explains a degree of sacrifice for the nation? So many simple elements are missing or barely touched upon.

An incomplete documentary like this is an insult to victims in Ukraine, Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova and beyond. It is also a disservice for Russians fighting to change their country. If you want to understand Russia, I suggest Timothy Snyder. This film still has fascinating images, beautiful montage and offers a chance to learn new facts if you know more about the context of Europe and Russia. But if you are European, I suggest discovering European culture and history, learning what ties us to Ukraine and how Russia sees all of Europe as its backyard.