Noticias

Exclusive: Line of Duty and This Is England star Vicky McClure is to front a bomb squad drama for ITV, produced by Htm Television, the production company set up by Line of Duty and Bodyguard creator Jed Mercurio.

Trigger Point is a six-part thriller, written by new writer Daniel Brierley, that follows counter terrorism policing and the terrifying work of the Metropolitan Police Bomb Disposal Squad.

Set in London, Trigger Point, follows the ‘expo’ officers, who risk their lives daily on the long walk towards danger. Death is always just a heartbeat away.

McClure, who also starred in Broadchurch, plays front line officer Lana Washington, who is an experienced bomb disposal operative. Reckless and out of control, Lana is ex-military and pushed to breaking point dealing with a series of improvised explosive devices which threaten the capital during a terrorist summer campaign. Under extreme pressure and searching for answers, Lana...

The Rome Film Festival to award its first posthumous award to the Russian filmmaker, who died in February.

The 8th Rome Film Festival (Nov 8-17) is to present its Lifetime Achievement Award to the family of Russian filmmaker Aleksei Yuryevich German, who died in February aged 74.

The director, who was based in Saint Petersburg, was informed of the award late last year, so as to accompany the release of his new film Hard To Be a God (Trudno byt’ bogom).

The award will be accepted by Svetlana Karmalita, the director’s widow, partner in all of his most personal projects and screenwriter for the filmmaker’s last two features, along with their son Aleksei A. German, who won the Silver Lion at the 2008 Venice Film Festival for Paper Soldier.

Following the ceremony, the world premiere of Hard To Be a God will be screened. Described as a “philosophical science-fiction epic”, the film was inspired by the 1964 cult...

Welcome back to my ongoing coverage of the Melbourne Cinematheque's fantastic program for 2013. Here, I will be reviewing the first film each season (month). This month I took a look at Trial of the Road (1971), the first of the films from Russian director Aleksey German. For the month of February I introduced one of Keisuke Kinoshita's works which can be found here. I hope you saw at least something from this series! Running from March 6-20, Aleksey German's retrospective of shocking and eye opening films that centre on the condemnation of the censored past of the Soviet Union display an uncanny filmmaking ability unlike anything at the time. Mixing hyper-surrealism and undefined characters that can never be identified as good or bad, all...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984)

"Among the most important retrospectives in years, War and Remembrance: The Films of Aleksei Guerman is also a bracing, deeply satisfying cinematic experience," begins Tony Pipolo at Artforum. To follow up on Maxim Pozdorovkin's Notebook piece, I'll be gathering pointers to further reading as the series runs at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York through Tuesday. Pipolo: "Though the Russian director's output is small, his track record is flawless. All five of his features are being screened in this, his first retrospective in North America, along with The Fall of Otrar (1991, directed by Ardak Amirkulov), a curious, almost minimalist epic about Genghis Khan, which Guerman produced and co-wrote in the lull between My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), his first international success, and Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), an exhilarating comic masterpiece and one of the great films of the 1990s."

"Guerman's first solo picture...

Above and below: Khrustalyov, My Car!.

The joke about Aleksei German was always that he was great but only Russians liked him. Several years ago, I invited a non-Russian-speaker to a screening of Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) at Brooklyn's Bam cinema. Ten minutes into the screening, an odd thing happened. I felt the urge to tell my companion to stop reading the subtitles.

The following scene prompted me: A middle-aged housekeeper opens the curtains and spikes her morning tea with cognac; someone polishes a shoe and talks about a veterinarian prone to lethargic sleep; a woman with a yoghurt facial scolds a senile lady for using a walker and, moments later, for taking a large kielbasa into bed with her. The old woman claims to be defenseless against sexual fantasies. Some words are misheard; a grocery receipt is scrutinized; a winter coat is sniffed in search of mothballs, two doll-like Jewish...