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"But we really must continue this discussion." Sovereign Film Distribution has debuted a new trailer for the UK release of Malmkrog arriving on VOD there starting in March. The film originally premiered at last year's Berlin Film Festival, and also stopped by the New York Film Festival and many others. Malmkrog, which translates to Manor House (the alternate release title), is the latest film from acclaimed Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu and runs a full 3 hours, 20 minutes but gets into some intense discussions. The film is made up almost entirely of conversations between guests at a house. A landowner, a politician, a countess, a General and his wife, all gather in a spacious manor and discuss death, war, progress and morality. As the time passes by, the discussion becomes more serious and heated. Starring Frédéric Schulz-Richard, Agathe Bosch, Diana Sakalauskaité, Marina Palii, Ugo Broussot, and István Téglás. Critics have been raving...

In Malmkrog, a group of Russian aristocrats gather in a grand rural estate to wax philosophical during a long and luxurious dinner party. The film offers seemingly the closest thing to a direct screen staging of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s War and Christianity: The Three Conversations. At 200 minutes, it runs just a few breaths short of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey but seldom ever leaves the confines of the decadent surrounding–indeed, the majority takes place in just three rooms. The dialogue sounds as if it has been taken verbatim. The camera hardly moves. We recommend caffeine, or perhaps something stronger.

Malmkrog was directed by Cristi Puiu, a filmmaker of the Romanian New Wave who first appeared on most people’s radars with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu in 2005, a film so vital and urgent it seemed to almost singlehandedly propel Romanian cinema to the top of the game for a while.

Since Cristi Puiu’s “Malmkrog” means to drown the viewer in a dense and arcane philosophical debate about Good and Evil, the nature of Christ, Europe and the direction of History, let’s add another strand to the discussion: how is cinema put to best use? It’s an especially pertinent question since Puiu’s always stunning use of space and light, so carefully calculated in every shot, so rigidly composed as if he’s used dioramas with dolls to ensure figures and objects will be exactly in the right place, makes even “Malmkrog” a cinematic experience despite a perverse amount of verbiage that demands absolute concentration for nearly three and a half hours. Yet given that he anxiously wants his audience – never more limited than with this film – to follow the calculatedly cruel intellectual jousting between his five main characters,

Perhaps if the voluminous script were first made required reading,...

"But is to be killed... an absolute evil?" Shellac has debuted the first official promo trailer for a loquacious historical drama titled Malmkrog, premiering in the "Encounters" section at the Berlin Film Festival this month. Malmkrog, which translates to Manor House, is the latest film from acclaimed Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu and runs a full 3 hours, 20 minutes (no surprise from an Eastern European filmmaker). The film is made up almost entirely of conversations between guests at a house. A landowner, a politician, a countess, a General and his wife, all gather in a spacious manor and discuss death, war, progress and morality. As the time passes by, the discussion becomes more serious and heated. Starring Frédéric Schulz-Richard, Agathe Bosch, Diana Sakalauskaité, Marina Palii, Ugo Broussot, and István Téglás. If you're into this kind of intellectual cinema, then you don't want to miss this. But I fully understand if you're not...

As we await the unveiling of the Golden Bear hopefuls, earlier today, the Berlin International Film Festival unveiled the fifteen features that will comprise the brand new Encounters comp section. Among the most anticipated items we find the section opener in Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog, (#27) a 200-minute drama.

Starring Frédéric Schulz-Richard, Agathe Bosch, Diana Sakalauskaité, Marina Palii, Ugo Broussot and István Téglás, this is about Nikolai, a large landowner, a man of the world, places his country estate at the disposal of some friends, by organizing a sojourn at the spacious manor house.…...

The 70th Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 20 – March 1) unveiled its Encounters program today, featuring the premieres of new works by Tim Sutton and Romanian director Cristi Puiu.

Also screening is Josephine Decker’s Shirley with Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg, marking the film’s international premiere after its upcoming Sundance bow, and Gunda by Victor Kossakovsky, whose last pic was the 2018 Venice doc Aquarela.

Encounters is a newly-created competitive section at the Berlin festival that looks to highlight “new voices in cinema and to give more room to diverse narrative and documentary forms.” A three-member jury will choose the winners for Best Film, Best Director and a Special Jury Award.

“As a result of passionate research, the 15 titles chosen for Encounters present the vitality of cinema in all of its forms. Each film presents a different way of interpreting the cinematic story: autobiographical, intimate, political,...