Once an upon time, in the USSR Territory

http://andrey-rublev.ru/

The plot of The Return did not directly concern the boys' mother and grandmother and so was played out in their absence. The Banishment, however, is as much the story of Vera's anguish as it is of Alex's emotional blankness, yet neither the script nor the film's structure give Vera the chance to articulate the cause of her despair to her husband. Her lie to Alex about the paternity of her child is posthumously revealed to have been an attempt to melt his cold heart. It stretches credulity that a character who would take this risk would not dare to tell the truth. Vera's one big speech, to Robert, is heard only in flashback, giving the impression that Zvyagintsev is insufficiently interested in her. Her eventual reduction to a plot device, sacrificed so that Alex can repent, is both troubling and dramatically debilitating. And yet, for all this, The Banishment is a visually powerful and haunting film.

Historic epic.

Set during WWII, this story is about a young man, Milos Hrma, who has inherited a cushy railroad job in a small Czechoslovakian town. He begins his training just as the German occupation is setting in. It's hard to tell what the chief influences have been in Milos' life. His father lies in bed with a long-ago healed injury, happily collecting his pension. His grandfather, a hypnotist, was killed while standing in front of the invading German tanks, trying to "hypnotize" them into retreat. Milos shows little interest in the German occupation or the war. His chief concerns are adjusting to his new job and finding a way to lose his virginity.

This powerful romance proves that true love can emerge from the most unlikely of places. Lea (Lenka Vlasakova) is a mute 21-year-old who is still affected by a major childhood trauma, while Herbert (Christian Redl) is a sad 51-year-old who continues to mourn the death of his wife. Lea strikingly resembles Herbert's wife, which sparks a connection that eventually results in marriage. At first, the couple are awkward and uncomfortable, but gradually they begin to lean on one another until their walls of defense begin to crumble. Featuring impassioned performances by Vlasakova and Redl, Ivan Fila's film is a touching romantic drama.

One of the most difficult things is touching a woman's soul, I guess. Hanna Schygulla is also nice surprise.

Polanski's debut.

Parajenov's best.

Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov illuminates the life and legend of Genghis Khan in his stunning historical epic, MONGOL. Based on leading scholarly accounts and written by Bodrov and Arif Aliyev, MONGOL delves into the dramatic and harrowing early years of the ruler who was born as Temudgin in 1162. As it follows Temudgin from his perilous childhood to the battle that sealed his destiny, the film paints a multidimensional portrait of the future conqueror, revealing him not as the evil brute of hoary stereotype, but as an inspiring, fearless and visionary leader. MONGOL shows us the making of an extraordinary man, and the foundation on which so much of his greatness rested: his relationship with his wife, Borte, his lifelong love and most trusted advisor.

http://www.andrzej-zulawski.com/Possession.html

This film is about the relationship between a sick mother and her son. (surprise.) Surely, this isn't for the average viewer: narrative is slow, events nonexistent; the film consists mostly of painting-like "still-lives" with very little dialogue. The mother and son walk along the beautiful sceneries (the film is done on the island of Rügen, by the coast of Germany), approach each other, take contact by embracing and hugging.

http://www.sokurov.spb.ru/island_en/feature_films/russkyi_kovcheg/mnp_ark.html

http://sokurov.info/sokurov_main_eng.htm

Katyn is a special film in my long career as a director. I never thought I would live to see the fall of the USSR, or that free Poland would provide me with the opportunity to portray on the screen the crime and lies of Katyn.

While Stalin's crime deprived my father of life, my mother was touched by the lies and the hoping in vain for the return of her husband.

The creation of the screenplay about Katyn took several years. The long, arduous process of looking through huge quantities of individual recollections, diaries, and other mementos confirmed my determination to base this first film about Katyn on the facts these materials related. And this is how the film's opening scene on the bridge, as well as the one featuring Soviet soldiers defacing the Polish flag, came to be. Most of the incidents depicted on the screen actually happened and were reported by eye-witnesses. While it is true that the details of the Katyn crime are now known, I couldn't omit, in this first film about the event, the image of death; death that met twenty thousand Polish officers. They were murdered, one at a time, a fact that was recorded in their personal files. This is evidence that the Soviet Union failed to recognize or respect any international standards, not even with regard to prisoners of war.

All the men who died did so as members of the Polish intelligentsia, and this paved the way for Stalin's subjugation of Poland.
A parallel theme to the Katyn crime is the Katyn lie and the official Soviet line that the Germans had committed the deed in 1941 after invading Soviet territory during the war.

This lie had its greatest impact on the wives, mothers, and daughters of the murdered officers. For it was these women, in their struggle to discover the truth, who experienced the greatest repression from the new government following 1945.

This is why, for years, Katyn has been an open, festering wound in the history of Poland that begged for a Polish film to address this topic. The first film.

Andrzej Wajda-2007

One of the Classics of Polish Cinema.

Skolimowski shoots primarily in cold tones, contrasting palettes, and darkness that reflect the myopia and moral ambiguity that underlies Okrasa's obsession. Using a fragmented, asequential structure that reflects the characters' fractured lives, Skolimowski illustrates the impossibility of reconciliation and closure in the wake of unreconciled trauma and complicit silence.

its dark, brooding tale of voyeurism, unrequited obsession, and ache of desire,

28th Int. Istanbul Film Festival

Tulpan, which means tulip, is the name of the girl pursued by Asa , an open-faced young man who claims to have been in the navy and tells his prospective in-laws tall tales of all the ugly sea creatures he has battled. In a nice touch, Dvortsevoy keeps the title character out of sight, letting the audience simply imagine she is the most beautiful land creature that ever lived. Asa lives in a yurt, a traditional steppe tent made of a felt-covered wooden frame, with his sister Samal , mother of three, and her stern husband Ondas , who tries to teach Asa how to deal with the herd and become a good herdsman. Ondas might one day give Asa his own herd, but only after he gets married, a prospect that seems to vanish when Tulpan rejects him because "his ears are too big". This leads to a dryly comic scene in which the unlikeliest of look-alikes, the "Prince of America," is brought into the argument to defend the size and nobleness of Asa's ears.

I invite u drinking beer by Vitava instead of drinking blood when you are watching 20 stars HORROR films.

http://www.anglickykral.cz/ojakeng.html

Forman's masterpiece. There are more works. I assume that M.Forman managed producing good films even in the States.

he only things I really knew about Andy Kaufman before I watched this film were that he played Latka on TAXI and that he was dead. Other than that, his life was a mystery to me. Apparently, that was the case for everyone who actually knew him because you don't really learn anything about the "real" Andy from this movie. The film is told from the outsiders point of view. This is a story about Andy and how his behavior affected not only the people around him, but the greater public who either loved or hated him. The film is not told from Andy's point of view and you never do find out why he did what he did. Does this make MAN ON THE MOON a bad film. No, but it does leave you feeling a bit empty. Of course, you can't really get answers from a dead guy, so the filmmakers are left speculating about his motivation for creating the kind of comedy he became infamous for.

"The People vs. Larry Flynt" is an excellent
film. I especially liked the variety of the
script: the roles of a tough federal judge, Jerry
Falwell, and Flynt's lawyer (Edward Norton) are
played straight with credible lines, while Flynt
and Althea can be as bizarre as, well, the First
Amendment allows. I am not an expert on the real
Larry Flynt's life, and I don't know how
accurately he is portrayed. I don't believe that
it is relevant. This film should be treated as
fiction, even if it has much basis in fact. I
don't think it glorifies Flynt, transforming a
porn peddler into a fighter for free speech.
Actually, the Flynt character is presented as a
jerk, and sometimes as a lunatic.

Hair is a 1979 film adaptation of the 1968 Broadway musical of the same title about a Vietnam war draftee who meets and befriends a tribe of long-haired hippies on his way to the army induction center. The hippies introduce him to their environment of marijuana, LSD, and unorthodox relationships.

M.Forman's the weekest work I have ever seen. Sharp falldown.

The film is rapturously beautiful, enticing us into a lush, aristocratic world. Colin Firth's engaging portrayal of Valmont bears little resemblance to the viper that Malkovich played. Despite his cruelties, Firth's Valmont is a childlike, even childish, romantic. Certainly Valmont's elderly aunt, played with scene-stealing deviltry by Fabia Drake, sees him that way.

The widowed Marquise de Merteuil (Annette Bening) sees Valmont, a former lover, as a valued friend but a fatal attraction. As a woman in a prefeminist society, she wages a devious war against male domination. When her lover (Jeffrey Jones) scorns her in favor of the virginal Cécile (Fairuza Balk), Merteuil entices Valmont to deflower the bride-to-be. When Merteuil feels shamed by the virtue of Madame de Tourvel (a bland Meg Tilly), she enlists Valmont to turn this pious judge's wife into an adulteress.

Loves of a Blonde is Forman’s earlier effort, one that was a huge success with Czech audiences and really put his name on the map. It is easy to see why: his treatment of relations between sexes in general and sex in particular was as revolutionary in Czechoslovakia as I am Curious was in the West. The part of the film that relates to the former has aged well: the awkwardness shared by both men and women on the verge of social and sexual contact makes for a delightful comedy of mores that, frame for frame, is as good as The Firemen’s Ball (the two share a good deal of acting talent).

Forman is never a didactic pedagogue; he understands that the most biting social comment can be conveyed even more effectively through the most inventive gags. Three guys at a dance send a bottle of wine to three girls. The waiter delivers the bottle to the wrong table with the wrong three girls. I dare any Hollywood director of Something-about-Mary school of comedy to get as many laughs and at the same time derive as much humanity from a simple setup like this.

Yet once the film leaves the social setup and goes into one-on-one sad story of one of the girls (Hana Brejchova, the blonde who went on to become the national It Girl) who hooks up with a handsome piano player, the story becomes far more predictable: Seduced-and-Abandoned as played out in a middle-class Socialist family.

The Criterion Collection continues issuing Czech New Wave masterpieces in the DVD format (see reviews of Closely Watched Trains and The Shop on Main Street). The two new additions, Milos Forman’s Firemen’s Ball and The Loves of a Blonde, are an excellent illustration of that turbulent period called the Prague Spring and its accompanying explosion of artistic creativity.

Forman can be accused of many things, but dumb is not one of them. In the opening shot you see couples floating to an awful rendition of the Beatles’ From Me to You, and you know right away you’re looking at a comedy of provincial mores. For East Europe in 1967, make it tenfold provincial.

So the "chairman" of the local fireman brigade is retiring, and his colleagues decide to throw him a party, plus raise some money in a charitable lottery. Small-town Czech firemen are anything but our larger-than-life 9/11 heroes: these overweight middle-aged men use their picks and shovels to toss snow at a burning house, rather than dash into the blazes of fire. But they are determined to throw a good party, with a beauty contest as its high point. The winner will present the retiring chairman with a miniature silver fireman axe in an elegant case.

The resulting farce is at once the bitterest and the sweetest comedy you will ever see. The closest American equivalents would probably be Waiting for Guffman and First in Show, though the farce in these two, made by professional comedians, is more deliberate, with the Comedy label showing. Forman is subtler and more cosmopolitan. Most of all, our firemen are confused: they look at some worn picture of bikini’d Miss World contestants (now touching in its wholesomeness) and try to select the local equivalents. The local beauties are literally dragged into competing; once they show up, the old geezers have no idea what to do next – especially when a distrustful mother of one of the girls shows up and won’t leave. For lack of a better idea, they march the girls around military-style. The girls, whose plainness is matched only by the ugliness of their outfits, can barely stifle their laughter, but they march obediently. This is a small town in pre-1968 Czechoslovakia, where feminism is a foreign word -- though at the end they refuse to go onstage.

Little by little, the embarrassment builds up, until even the modest pickings of the lottery get stolen, including headcheese and chocolate balls. Finally, do you think that the retiring chairman got his silver axe? Hah. In the interview that accompanies the film on DVD, Forman sounds harsh on his thieving countrymen and claims that his film is a metaphor for the entire corrupt, incompetent Socialist system. It is certainly a legitimate reading: "Reputation of our brigade is more important," says one of the bosses, "than your stupid honesty." Remarks like these could not possibly clear the Czech Kultural Komissariat, who in the wake of the Soviet invasion had no choice but to ban the film.

But a mere political metaphor would not hold up as well as Firemen’s Ball has. The Wall collapsed, Czechoslovakia fell apart, and the new Czech Republic not only has a McDonalds on every corner, but an acclaimed poet and playwright for a president. And Firemen’s Ball survives, as the best Hymn to Incompetence and Mediocrity and Petty Thievery and other human weaknesses ever made.

Blending elements of horror, fantasy and eroticism, Valerie's story is told in a dreamlike, whimsical fashion.

1971

"Dazzling? Jancsó's awesome fusion of form with content and politics with poetry equals the exciting innovations of the French New Wave? it may well be the greatest Hungarian film of the sixties and seventies." (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

All Bela TARR films.

John Alton would be proud of much of The Man From London?who needs story when everything can be expressed in opaque pools of light and the void of darkest, deepest shadow?

Sátántangó opens to a languid, insidiously ironic shot of cattle traversing the muddy field of a near desolate, neglected communal farm in rural Hungary, as the cows concurrently attempt to mate during the process of migration.

Hot War is over, but Cold War is just started.

As the 20th century disfigures a city, groups of teen-age boys skirmish over its last remaining vacant lot. A territorial imperative drives them into paramilitary gangs, complete with bugles, spears and articles of war. As is common with armies and youths, the weakest individual is the most brutalized. He is Nemecsek (Anthony Kemp), the smallest and most sensitive of the Paul Street boys, who would sacrifice anything?including his life?to gain the recognition of his classmates. His chance soon comes. Already snuffling with a severe cold, Nemecsek ventures onto the turf of the dreaded Red Shirts, gets caught and thrown into a lake. He contracts a fatal illness; burning with fever, he helps the Paul Street boys to victory, then is taken home to die. A week later the disputed ground itself is sentenced to death as the site of a new apartment house. The sacrifice, the armies, the war itself were only a series of absurdities.

Part coming of age story set in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, and part personal testament by lead actress Krystyna Janda on her husband, Edward Klosinski's battle with cancer during filming, Andrzej Wajda's poignant, if disarticulated Sweet Rush, on the surface, suggests kinship with the metacinema of Abbas Kiarostami in exploring the interpenetration between art and life. This ambiguity is suggested in the film's opening sequence, as Janda awakens gasping for breath in a sparely furnished room before expressing her recounting her husband's diagnosis, reluctance to embark on a new project, and disbelief that he would succumb to his illness. However, inasmuch as the scene suggests a shift from dream to reality, it also underscores its construction - Janda's acting in the staged awakening and delivery of the subsequent monologue. The juncture between reality and fiction is also reflected in the image of a film crew setting up a scene that transitions to the sequence of a country doctor (Jan Englert) diagnosing his wife Marta's (Janda) terminal illness. Still mourning the loss of her sons and distanced from her overworked husband, Marta begins to turn her attention to a handsome young man, Bogus (Pawel Szajda), briefly finding a renewed sense of purpose in her life in the midst of disillusionment and uncertainty. At the core of Wajda's interweaving stories of grief and loss is the nature of performance. Juxtaposing Janda's real-life ordeal with the tragic denouement of the fiction film, Wajda transforms a seemingly conventional, period romance into an intimate and contemporary tale of enduring love and, in the process, elevates the grace of everyday struggle into the realm of art.

The chirps, tweets and croaks, along with the rush of the river itself often threaten to drown out the fairly minimal dialogue and engulf the brother and sister with a pulsating rhythm which hints at the passions bubbling away below their placid demeanors. The cinematography is also very imaginative, and there are moments, such as when a flotilla of boats gathers for a funeral service, when both sound and vision combine to magnificent effect. During this sequence, among others, one can surely detect echoes of the films of Terrence Malick and the early work of Peter Weir.