Rating: 3.5★
Werner Herzog has spent much of his career seeking out people who have pressed themselves against the outer edges of human experience, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) may be the purest expression of that instinct he ever put on film. The subject is Dieter Dengler, a German-born
Country United Kingdom
I will be honest, for its first twenty minutes I was not at all sure about Lady, and then it pulled a swerve that completely won me over. What begins as a familiar cringe-comedy mockumentary quietly transforms into something far stranger, sadder and more ambitious, and by the end
Country United Kingdom
Craft can carry a film a surprisingly long way, and Aisha Boudjillouli's Eyeliner is a good test of exactly how far. This NFTS stop-motion short is, on a technical level, genuinely lovely, beautifully animated and well voiced, and it is tackling a tender subject with obvious sincerity.
Rating: 2.5★
By 1948, film noir had already carved out its own corner of Hollywood, and the crime picture was a reliable commercial form, polished but unremarkable in many hands. Force of Evil arrives at that moment with rather more ambition than the genre usually demanded. It is based on Ira Wolfert&
Country Armenia
There is a lot to enjoy in Wow, A Talking Fish!, though I have to be upfront: I was let down by the screener rather than the film. Robert Sahakyants' short is a surreal, sharp-edged bit of Soviet-era animation with terrific voice work, but the copy I
Country Hungary
Hey, You is a feast for the eyes. Péter Szoboszlay's Hungarian short is one of those pieces where you could pause on almost any frame and happily hang it on the wall, and while it is not fine-art realism, for its time and its means it is
Country Hungary
Golden Bird is a small, beautifully judged piece that does a surprising amount in seven minutes. The work of Dóra Keresztes and István Orosz, it is a striking black-and-white line drawing brought to life, and I liked it a great deal. Three and a half stars for a
Country Poland
If You Want Peace, Prepare for War is a genuinely lovely piece of craft that runs out of things to say almost before it has begun. Zofia Oraczewska's short is a delicate, distinctive bit of work, closer to paper art than animation in the traditional sense, and it
Country Estonia
Incipit Vita Nova is a gloriously strange little thing, and I mean that as a high compliment. Hardi Volmer's Estonian short barely feels like an animation at first, playing more like a surreal live-action oddity, before it tips its hero into a fantastical world and the stop-
Article
One of the real treats of this year's Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival is Politics of the Imagination: Animations of the Eastern Bloc, a programme gathering shorts made between 1958 and 1992, from the far side of the Iron Curtain. It is a title that tells you exactly
Country Czech Republic
Every so often you watch something and simply marvel at the craft of it, and Jan Švankmajer's Jabberwocky is exactly that. This is the third or fourth of the great Czech surrealist's stop-motion pieces I have seen, and it is comfortably the most accomplished. In
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that matter because of what they are, and there are films that matter because of what they started. Nanook of the North belongs firmly to the second category. Released in 1922 and produced under the banner of the French trading company Les Frères Revillon, it is widely
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