Critics and admirers of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Elena” may find it easy to notice the obvious attributes of crime thriller, present in this film, but rarely seem to express their appreciation of its darkly comedic undertone.

Humor begins with the title, whose apparent similarity to the “arbitrarily chosen fist name” titles…

It’s a great movie.

I’m not a Quentin Tarantino fan. I resent “Titus Andronicus” style of violence in film or any kind of dramatic or visual art, and I’m repelled by sadism and necrophilia in cinema. Quentin Tarantino has been delighting in torture since his debut as a filmmaker 20…

A spiritual being, thrown into the material reality, inevitably becomes traumatized, mutilated.  Similarly to how in Japan they used to bind little girls’ feet, to conform to the notion that the feet of a fashionably attractive woman must be small (rendering an adult Japanese “beauty queen” practically a disabled…

This essay is written by a guest author, Yana Skrynnik.

*  *  *

Madame de… Who is she? In the beginning of the film we see her as a high society woman, leading a rather empty, frivolous life, defined by the norms and customs of her environment. She’s attached…

I once met a rather well-educated and experienced film critic who told me that in her opinion, Ingmar Bergman’s films of the later period were way too complex to be ever understood by any audience, no matter how sophisticated and intellectually advanced. According to that critic, “Efter repetitionen” (“After…

The author of this essay is not a Twin Peaks fan: not only he resents the idea of fandom, but also finds Twin Peaks extremely imperfect. And yet, despite all its imperfections, Twin Peaks, without a doubt, is a great work of art, comparable in its importance with such…

Every aspect of a truly artistic film (or a work of art in any medium) should in some way contribute to the key idea expressed in it. The title is no exception. An ideal title should serve as a metaphor for such idea and be constructed in a way…

At a first glance this film may give you a strong impression of being merely a piece of communist propaganda. Marxist ideology and materialistic philosophical notions seem to permeate every scene and every bit of dialogue. Characters in this movie shout a lot, and seem to express their political…

Many film connoisseurs mistakenly qualify “The Woman in the Window” as “minor Fritz Lang”, considering it more mainstream, less original and less art-like compared to Lang’s earlier “Der Müde Tod” (1921), “Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler” (1922), “Die Nibelungen” (1924), ”Metropolis” (1927) and “

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (“La Gioconda”, c. 1503-05, Louvre) is arguably the most famous visual representation of a threshold guardian archetype in the history of the Western art. Incidentally, Elisabeth (Lisa), means “God is my vow”, which could also be interpreted as “consecrated to God”. Spiritually enlightened human…

Works of art in any medium, including film, may be sorted in two broad categories according to the methods chosen by their creators: art addressing intellect and art targeting emotions. Having stated that, I feel I must immediately emphasize that intellectual art obviously doesn’t preclude emotions, and neither is…

I want to begin by deciphering the meaning of the film’s iconic logo, used in its opening credits and posters. If we understand the meaning of that image, it will be a lot easier to recognize the message conveyed in this work of cinematic art. Here’s the full image,…

A note on the method: one of the key questions we must ask when analyzing any work of art is whether the artist expresses a pessimistic or optimistic point of view. It’s typically “either – or”, because the mixture of both is practically never even, and tends toward either…

There’s a certain type of predator whose function is to lure potentially enlightened people away from enlightenment.  The predator, socially deprived of traditional ways to achieve dominance, is motivated by the urge to dominate and will occupy the professional position of authority related to a certain spiritual phenomenon, and…

The novella is a warning. There exists a type of bourgeois whose method of mimicry makes him or her appear as an intellectual. That type of a person gains access to certain bits of high spiritual knowledge (ether by stealing it from true intellectuals or gaining whatever is publicly…