Tag: Mikhail Kalatozov

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes Us All Stronger: Letter Never Sent, Individualism, and the Survival Genre

  By
A lone human figure wanders through a wintry landscape. Shot from the film Letter Never Sent.

|Cole Seidl| Letter Never Sent is many things: a visual tour-de-force, a technological marvel, an allegory of Soviet resilience, a grueling survival thriller. It is also, notably, the rare great film that openly rejects an individualist perspective in its storytelling. Continue reading

Like Ships Sailing – How Mikhail Kalatozov Earned His Place in Cinema History

  By
A woman with a dirty face stands stoically next to a soldier wearing a helmet in the film "The Cranes Are Flying."

|Dan Howard| With every generation, a film comes around that provides a fresh new take on a genre. Most war films aren’t of interest to me, but when we leave the trenches (or spend little time in them) and the battlefield, we see different sides of war that we wouldn’t expect. Continue reading