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The director, who rose to fame with Loop, is in Budapest toiling away on his second feature, a FocusFox Studio production toplined by Péter Bárnai, Vivien Rujder and János Kulka. Since 20 February, Isti Madarász has been shooting Half Way Home (Átjáróház), his second feature, following the promising science-fiction flick Loop (2017), which took part in the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival and Fantasporto, among other gatherings. Toplining the movie, which would appear to be a modern revisiting of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, are Péter Bárnai (the young prosecutor from Strangled), Vivien Rujder (glimpsed in On Body and Soul) and János Kulka, who are flanked by Elizabeth Kútvölgyi, Miklós Galla, Attila Árpa and Kata Dobó.In the story, written by Attila Veres, protagonist Krisztián, in his...

Director Árpád Sopsits finds a queasy political dimension to the Martfü murders in 1957, for which the wrong man was jailed

Here is a bleak, brutal, dispiriting serial killer drama, based on a real-life case from postwar Hungary: the Martfü murders, in which the film finds a queasy political dimension. In 1957, in the provincial town of Martfü in eastern Hungary, a young woman is found brutally killed. Her boyfriend confesses to the crime, but after he has been in prison for some years, more women are murdered and it appears the real culprit is still at large, and the convicted man may have had his confession beaten out of him, or confessed due to a complex, deep-seated guilt about something other than the crime itself.

Gábor Jászberényi is Réti, the innocent man; Zsolt Anger is Bóta, the anguished cop who got it wrong and Péter Bárnai is Szirmai, the fierce new...