East European Film Bulletin

Closer to the mainstream than he would ever admit, László Nemes recounts the final years of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin in a ‘French’ film that falls into all the clichés the director of Son of Saul had previously resisted with persistent – and not insignificant – arrogance throughout his career.

Not that it particularly matters to anyone that...

Realism is an odd category for cinema. During the silent and early sound eras of the 1920s and 1930s, cultural critic Ilya Ehrenburg used the term “dream factory” to describe, not without cynicism, how film studios applied industrial methods to manufacture human fantasy and emotion. The phrase crossed into the American lexicon through fan magazines and gossip columns, where i...

Not so much because of its title, Zvyagintsev’s return to Cannes took on a mythological dimension. Following a severe post-COVID coma that led many to assume the end of his filmmaking career, the director, now residing in France, presented Minotaur in competition at the festival. Of course, the film’s title does invoke Greek mythology while the story adapts Claude Ch...

Rather than documenting the life and work of Czech conceptual artist Miloš Šejn, Jakub Kučera’s Because I Have To attempts to embody Šejn’s artistic worldview through a series of performative encounters with nature. Rejecting the conventional biopic in favor of sensory exploration, the documentary pursues a cinema of presence and contemplation. However, by treating Š...