A phantasmagoria of Armenian history and culture, from the officially disapproved Soviet filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov (among his crimes: homosexuality). A stranger to this territory might well feel the need for some textual commentary, footnotes, and the like, but he would not be bothering to feel that need in a lesser movie than this one. Its imagery holds the eye and holds the screen, with shallow, frontal compositions and the scuffed, weathered texture and muted colors of old painted wood. The actors are a bit like marionettes and cuckoo-clock figures, and though there are snatches of voice-over narration and interspersed title cards, there is no conventional dialogue. You would have to think back perhaps to Georges Méliès to find anything quite so flattened to the plane of the screen, quite so literally two-dimensional, and the flair for cinematic prestidigitation helps firm up that comparison. The whole thing feels in a lot of ways like a dream; and as such it will make more sense to some sorts of people than others, but it will exercise no less mesmerism even on plenty of those others. (1969) — Duncan Shepherd