Aleksei Guerman’s Hard to be a God (FREE )

The late Russian director Aleksei Guerman’s last film is a grandly arbitrary carnival of neo-medieval depravity. It’s also a mudpunk allegory of Russian barbarism and backwardness. The action of this sci-fi film is set on a planet parallel to earth that knew no Renaissance (let alone an Enlightenment) and keeps its inhabitants, with their modern-day consciousness and vernacular, trapped in the low-tech crudeness and amoral violence of the Middle Ages. Monstrous visions appear with an obsessive attention to detail; with a glistening black-and-white palette, the director smears the screen with mud, blood, and excrement! (Mature Content)