The first project completed by director Tarr Béla, and the second released, the 1977/’79 film Family Nest is a great deal more conventional than the student short Hotel Magnezit, though mostly for that reason, it’s also a great deal more successful and satisfying. Opening with a title card ironically claiming that this isn’t a true […]

For anyone who doesn’t speak Hungarian – and you, reader of this English-language film blog written by an American, will be shocked, I am certain, to learn that I do not speak Hungarian – the work of director Tarr Béla (or Béla Tarr, if you’re too good to use Hungarian name order) is typically held […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/18 & 10/19World premiere: 3 July, 2013, Karlovy Vary Film Festival Special Mention by the Festival jury for Molnár Piroska Szász János’s The Notebook is an immensely handsome movie, and it is a movie about two children surviving World War II at the expense of their childlike innocence, and if […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/13 & 10/15 World premiere: 15 February, 2011, Berlin Film Festival It is with a curious sense of amused embarrassment that I welcome Tarr Béla, one of the most individualistic and incalculably important filmmakers currently alive, to the annals of this weblog with his final film, The Turin Horse. Allegedly, final, of […]

The Cold War-era history of Hungary is not a subject upon which I have any particular claim of expertise; for am I an American, and we are required by convention and national fidelity not to give a shit about what happened anywhere else in the world during that period. And for this reason, it took […]

To be entirely fair, it’s more than a little impressive that Mundruczó Kornél’s Delta was completed at all, no matter how underdone the final project feels. Back in 2006, the film was about half-finished when Bertók Lajos, the actor playing the main character, died suddenly, and it took close on to a year for production […]