The current cinema, M-word edition

I think both Alexei German’s Hard To Be A God (above) and Abderrahamane Sisako’s Timbuktu are mas­ter­pieces, but they’re also films that demon­strate the neces­sary elasti­city of the pos­sibly over­used term. German’s film, dec­ades in the mak­ing, insist­ently unpleas­ant if not har­row­ing, replete with nar­rat­ive dif­fi­culty and sleeve-tugging if not wedgie-pulling sub­text, a metic­u­lous immer­sion into an awful cre­ated world that’s a mir­ror of our own, feels very much like a mag­num opus. Sisako’s film, gor­geous, quietly vir­tu­osic, telling a tra­gic and at times har­row­ing story but also graced with moments of quiet beauty and suf­fused with an abid­ing wis­dom that it shares with a sub­dued but entirely right­eous anger seems “merely” like a story Sisako wants to tell. How much these apprehensions/intuitions have to do with the fact that German’s is a posthum­ous film and Sisako, at age 53, has many more movies to make, is of course an open ques­tion In the mean­time, I review both films for RogerEbert.com at the links attached to the titles. 

The German film’s run at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives is part of a sub­stan­tial ret­ro­spect­ive of the great dir­ect­or’s work, includ­ing such won­ders as 1971’s Trial On The Road (fur­ther proof of my max­im that the Russians made the abso­lute best World War II films) and the har­row­ing, phant­asmagor­ic 1998 Khrustalyov, My Car!, both of which I wrote a bit about here. I hope to write more on German (or Guerman) soon.