Cinema-V

Tag: Andrei Tarkovsky

The Monster Is Loose: Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan as a Parable of Putin’s Russia?

Russian cinema has always commanded international respect, even when things were frosty between the Soviet Union and the ‘West.’ The same still holds true for the modern arthouse movies from the country. Since the early 2000s, Andrei Zvyagintsev has become one of the more distinguished Russian directors. Particularly because of the recent crisis between his […]

April 30, 2015
Bitter Sweet Symphony: Terrence Malick Takes Us To The Wonder

There is no other director like Terrence Malick. Granted, you could probably say that about pretty much every other filmmaker out there. The American director, however, remains a peculiar case. After all, we’re talking about an eccentric, reclusive artist who deliberately stepped away from the limelight and the Hollywood industry after a really promising debut, […]

June 25, 2013
Danger Zone: Science-Fiction and Metaphysics in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker

Apart from legendary Battleship Potemkin genius Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky is arguably Russia’s most renowned movie director from the Soviet era. The son of famous poet Arseni Tarkovsky polarizes, however. Opinions on him are divided. Some can’t really get into his films and only consider them to be dead boring. Others regard these works as […]

April 4, 2013
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: James Bond’s Impressive Comeback in Sam Mendes’s Skyfall

To the sounds of energetic percussive music, James Bond tracks down a villain on the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. All of a sudden, a Jeep manned by a female British agent picks him up. Mere moments later, 007 has already become involved in a motorbike chase over the rooftops along the marketplace. He lands on […]

November 4, 2012
Touch-Type: Valeri Todorovsky’s Katya Ismailova and the Post-Soviet Years

Remember the days when there were no word processors and computers? ‘It was twenty years ago today,’ maybe a bit longer, when everybody used to write with a pen and some people did nothing else but interpret another person’s handwriting. Such a job was called ‘typist,’ and the French-Russian 1994 production Katya Ismailova by Hipsters […]

April 9, 2012
Family Affair: Elena as a Thought-Provoking Character Study and Portrait of Life in Contemporary Russia

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Leo Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of his famous novel Anna Karenina. This was true for the aristocratic clans in the tsardom of the 19th century and it is still valid for many societies, especially contemporary Russia with its glaring social […]

February 22, 2012
Bridges to Babylen: Generation P as a Cyberpunk Satire of Russian Consumerism in the 1990s

“We’re waiting for changes,” Victor Tsoy, arguably the biggest rock star of the Soviet Union, exclaimed in the late 1980s. They would come only a few years later. The 1990s were a decade of transformations on both sides of the formerly bipolar world order, and the cultural climate was largely represented by their teens and […]

February 15, 2012