A personal journal of film and documentary reviews, and reviews of anything else that intrigues me.
Films made with an obvious bias to serve a larger agenda or to mitigate a controversial topic and make it safe for general public consumption.
D I Yashin, “Experiments in the Revival of Organisms” (1940) A curious short documentary from 1940 about a series of experiments on reviving dead or inanimate…
Jesper Huor and Bosse Lindquist, “WikiRebels” (2010) Made for Sveriges Television AB (SVT), this documentary traces the rise of Wikileaks, the global non-profit media organisation that…
Marcela Gaviria, “WikiSecrets” (2011) Took in this documentary on SBS1 last night on the case of Bradley Manning, the US soldier arrested in May 2010 f0r…
Louie Psihoyos, “The Cove” (2009) This documentary by American photographer and film-maker Louie Psihoyos combines spy thriller genre elements with an agenda to educate the public about…
Dziga Vertov, “Man with a Movie Camera” / “Chelovek s Kino-apparatom” / “Liudyna z Kinoaparatom” (1929) No plot, no obvious characters or a point of view…
Vasily Zhuravlov, “The Space Voyage” / “Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya Novella” (1936) In the 1930s, the youth branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, usually…
Alexander Dovzhenko, “Aerograd” (1935) It’s a well-made film with stunning shots of wilderness and planes flying in the sky but where would a Dovzhenko film be without…
Mikhail Karyukhov and Alexander Kozyr, “The Sky Calls” / “Nebo Zovyot” (1959) A visually stunning film about space exploration, “The Sky Calls” was the first in…
Eastern European Films, Russian and Soviet Films
Alexander Dovzhenko, “Arsenal” (1928) Notable for its skilful use of montages of images to create and build tension, excitement, urgency and other moods, “Arsenal” revolves around an incident…
Sergei Eisenstein, “Alexander Nevsky” (1938) Unashamedly patriotic and stirring action-movie propaganda for the masses and the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin at the time of release,…