Directed by Georgiy Daneliya • Drama • With Stanislav Lyubshin, Levan Gabriadze • 1986 • 133 minutes
Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa Solaris directing Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and you'll come close to the existential weirdness of this loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy. Two average Muscovites - a plainspoken construction foreman and a Georgian violin student - encounter an odd homeless man on the street who asks, 'Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura?' In a flash, they're teleported across the universe to the planet Pluke in the Kin-Dza-Dza galaxy - a Tatooine-like desert world whose inhabitants are hilariously noncommunicative. A deadpan, absurdist mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, and Jodorowsky's never-made Dune, the film is also a savage satire of bureaucratic idiocy and dysfunction.
Up Next in May's Top 30 Films
-
Outgrow the System
Directed by Cecilia Paulsson, Anders Nilsson • Documentary • 2023 • 58 minutes
"Change the system, not the climate" is a common demand in the climate movement. But what kind of system do we actually want? In the midst of humanity's worst crisis, there are pioneers standing ready. Meet the new ec...
-
Sebastiane (Derek Jarman)
Directed by Derek Jarman • Drama • With Leonard Treviglio, Barney James, Richard Warwick, Neil Kennedy • 2012 • 85 minutes
Derek Jarman's (Caravaggio) feature film debut (co-directing with Paul Humfress), Sebastiane is a "one of a kind" (Time Out London) historical drama which lays bare the lat...
-
The Perfect Meal, Episode 2: Liquid Gold
Directed by Alexandros Merkouris • Documentary • 2023 • 26 minutes
In Pamplona, Spain, a group of scientists have been researching the connection between our health and the food we've been eating since the 1980s. Led by Dr. Miguel Ángel Martínez-González and Dr. Miguel Ruiz Canela, they argue th...
