Alternative Film Guide

"You are never, ever, going to see anything to equal it … as spectacular as a movie can possibly be." That’s Roger Ebert, referring to Sergei Bondarchuk’s mammoth 7-hour epic Voyna i mir / War and Peace (1967), which won numerous accolades, including the best foreign-language film Oscar in 1968. (A six-hour, dubbed version was [...]

A bit of Communist propaganda, courtesy of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Bronenosets Potyomkin / Battleship Potemkin. Considered by many one of the greatest — if not the greatest — film ever made, Battleship Potemkin is best remembered for the "Odessa Steps" expressionist montage sequence.
The propaganda is so effective that the film was, at some [...]

"Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking" (January 25 — February 14, 2008) at New York City’s Film Society of Lincoln Center:
"Although early film shows took place in Russia soon after the invention of cinema (Maxim Gorky’s book In the Kingdom of Shadows, published July 4, 1896, is one of the most beautiful early descriptions of [...]

"Much like Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life in American culture," writes Peter Finn in the Washington Post, "the Soviet film The Irony of Fate has a permanent home in Russian hearts — and on TV screens every holiday season."
Finn describes Eldar Ryazanov’s 184-minute 1975 romantic comedy-drama as "a sweet, witty romance that also took [...]

Kirill Serebrennikov’s Izobrajaya Zhertvy / Playing the Victim, a modernized and darkly humorous adaptation of Hamlet starring Yuri Chursin and Anna Mikhalkova (Nikita Mikhalkov’s daughter and Andrei Konchalovsky’s niece), won the Best Film Award at the 1st edition of the RomeFilmFest this past Saturday, Oct. 21. "This film is a film for Russia and for [...]

Italy’s choice for this year’s Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award is Emanuele Crialese’s Nuovomondo / The Golden Door, winner of several prizes at this year’s Venice Film Festival, including a Silver Lion Revelation Award. Nuovomondo, or "New World," follows a number of Sicilians who want to emigrate to the United States.
The film, which stars [...]

Among the 49 entries vying for the 2006 Best European Film nominations are:
Berlin Film Festival winner Grbavica, Jasmila Zbanic’s Bosnian War tale about a girl who discovers that her mother has been less than honest about the identity of her long-lost father; Il Caimano / The Cayman, Nanni Moretti’s cinematic attack on right-wing Italian Prime [...]

At London’s Barbican Centre: Jean Epstein, best known for his Gothic silent classic The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), was also responsible for the naturalistic semi-documentary Finis Terrae (1929), which will be screened at the Barbican’s Cinema 1 at 3 p.m. on Sept. 17.
Shot on the coast of Brittany, Finis Terrae portrays the [...]

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica
I first saw the 2002 Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris, starring George Clooney, then read Stanislaw Lem’s novel, and then watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 169-minute film version of the book, Solyaris / Solaris, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year.
Each successive interpretation I’ve [...]

The 11th San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theater begins this Friday, July 14.
The three-day festival will include screenings of Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven (1927 - Friday, July 14, 8:00pm), a huge box-office and critical success at the time, and the winner of the first Best Direction (Drama) Academy Award. (That [...]

In the Hollywood Reporter, Stephen Galloway writes about the challenges faced by film preservationists in the United States, while in the New York Times, Paul Sonne’s explains how Russians are eagerly and skeptically awaiting the initial broadcast of the nearly 9-hour miniseries The Master and Margarita, which is based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s cult novel.
Hollywood Foreign [...]

The Moscow Times reports that a silent film festival will bring back to the fore 1910s Russian star Vera Kholodnaya. Four of Kholodnaya’s films will be shown at Moscow’s Illyuzion Theater in the upcoming weeks: Be Silent, Sorrow, Be Silent, a 1918 production about a circus artist who, while married to an alcoholic acrobat, is [...]

4 / Chetyre (2005)
Direction: Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Screenplay: Vladimir Sorokin and Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Cast: Yuri Laguta, Sergei Shnurov, Marina Vovchenko
 
BAD MATH
Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s relentlessly bleak feature film debut, 4, starts with a bang and ends with a painfully longwinded whimper. Here, I’m using the word "bang" literally, for the film begins with four dogs lying [...]

The 55th Berlin International Film Festival will present a reconstructed version of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin, considered by many film scholars as one of — if not the — best motion picture ever made.
Battleship Potemkin was originally commissioned by the Russian Communist leaders to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Odessa uprising, during [...]