Review – The Battleship Potemkin

Though this occupies a firm and well-deserved spot on any serious film student’s must-see list, the propaganda gets laid on pretty thick. Director Sergei Eisenstein was a master at treating the cinema as a graphic art, and in this silent production from 1925 you can witness the birth of composition and montage techniques that made the movies what they are today. The story, on the other hand, is a silly tale of valiant, strong and universally good proletarians versus the creepy, weak and uniformly evil forces of the Czar. Plot aside, however, even all these years later it’s still a genuine pleasure to see a brilliant artist at the top of his game. Buy the disc