Soviet cinema gave the world some of its most influential filmmaking theory and practice, from Eisenstein's revolutionary montage in Battleship Potemkin to Tarkovsky's slow, meditative poetry in Stalker. Working under strict ideological constraints, directors found extraordinary ways to push the art form forward. See what Macca made of them below.
Rating: 3.5★
Twenty-ninth highest-rated film of all time on Letterboxd. Let that sink in for a moment. That is the weight I Am Cuba carries before you have even pressed play, and it is, frankly, an impossible burden for any film to shoulder. I went in expecting something close to
Rating: 1.5★
There's a version of The Seasons that I could imagine loving. Shepherds in the Armenian highlands, a brutal and beautiful landscape, Vivaldi's Four Seasons rolling underneath it all. On paper, that's genuinely poetic. In practice, I sat there waiting for something to happen, and
Rating: 4.0★
There's a particular kind of pressure that comes with sitting down to watch a film that half your friends have handed a perfect score. Scrolling through Letterboxd and seeing Elem Klimov's 1985 war epic sitting proudly as one of the highest-rated films of all time,
1960s
The last fifteen minutes of Viy are something else. A church fills with demons, spectral hands reach through stone walls, a levitating corpse traces slow circles through the dark, and then the creature itself is revealed: an ancient, monstrous thing with eyelids that have to be lifted by its servants
Genre Drama
★½ — Earth (1930)
Genre Romance
★★ — By the Bluest of Seas (1936)
Genre Drama
★★ — The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
Genre Documentary
★★★ — Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Genre Science Fiction
★★★ — Stalker (1979)
Genre Drama
★★½ — Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free