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Stars: Berik Aytzhanov, Anna Starchenko, Azamat Nigmanov, Yerken Gubashev, Nurbek Mukushev | Written and Directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Many people feel that the film Steppenwolf was based on Hermann Hesse’s novel ‘Steppenwolf,’ first published in German in 1927. But that would be a mistake to believe that. Because, according to director Adilkhan Yerzhanov, the film is nothing like the novel, except that it examines the dichotomy between the spiritual and animalistic natures in man.

Over the years, Arrow Video have distributed many foreign language films to English-speaking audiences. This way we can experience the amazing filmmakers from around the world. Now Steppenwolf gets its turn to shine on Blu-ray!

Tamara (Anna Starchenko), a young lady consumed by trauma, searches for her missing son, Timka, in a small town dominated by riots and violence. In a desperate attempt to get him back, she teams up with an amoral former police investigator (Berik Aitzhanov...

If endless sequels, prequels, reboots, spin-offs, teamups, callbacks and shout-outs have put you off the idea of the “shared cinematic universe,” you haven’t been spending enough time in Karatas, world cinema’s smallest, wildest, weirdest crossover microcosm. The fictional village in rural Kazakhstan, populated exclusively by the clueless, the cowardly, the comic and the corrupt has provided a stark, absurdist backdrop for most of prolific Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s films, including his newest, the dark, funny, freaky “Assault.”

It may not be the most essential Yerzhanov entry — it’s not the darkest, funniest or freakiest — but “Assault” is a droll refresher on his singular sensibilities, and his borderline miraculous ability to maintain a coherent tone while narrative logic and consistency are highly expendable commodities. Good taste, too, can be as casually tossed out as one of the stuttered insults that make up about 80 percent of the dialogue. Here,...

In the past 20 months, we have all learned what an expression “herd immunity” means, for reasons well known. The Covid-19 pandemic has come even to the most remote places of the world, like the village of Karatas in Southern Kazakhstan which serves as the location and the source of inspiration (usually in the form of a metaphor for a hotbed of corruption) for most of the work by Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov. Oddly, this not Yerzhanov’s first “epidemic rodeo”, as some could remember “The Plague in Karatas Village” (2016), but “Herd Immunity” still comes at the right time. Like Yerzhanov’s previous film, “Ulbolsyn”, “Herd Immunity” premiered at Black Nights Film Festival where we had the chance to see it.

Our unlikely hero is Selkeu (Yerzhanov’s regular Daniyar Alshinov), one of the two Karatas sheriffs, the other being an ex-police officer Zhamzhysh (Nurbek Mukushev). Selkeu is from somewhere abroad...