This biopic of the Georgian painter embodies the style of his paintings in subtle, but increasingly felt, ways: the unusual frontality of the compositions, the bawdy humor, the bleakness, the slightly skewed perspective on mundane subjects (like Pirosmani's now-legendary-to-me giraffe painting, or to give one example in the film, the cartoonish texture given Pirosmani's grocery items like honey or a block of cheese). Avtandil Varazi plays the painter as a drifting observer whose stone face rarely wavers, and Shengalaia's compositions…

One of the top reviews for this film on Letterboxd sums this up by writing, "White people cure apartheid with rugby," which is the kind of crackerjack criticism you can only get on a site as dumb as this one - it reads like the author probably just looked at the DVD cover and assumed that that's what the movie would be. Or, in other words, this is endemic of the kinds of willful misunderstanding that accompanies many of Clint…

Released early in the development of the Czechoslovak New Wave, it’s fun and fitting to think of The Cassandra Cat as a metaphor for the cinema movement and its place in the strict communist regime of Czechoslovakia. The titular cat removes his glasses and shows the people of the town their true colors. This, too, is what the Czech New Wave filmmakers set out to dd, often to the dismay of their country’s censors who, like many of the townspeople…