Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

The critic praises its thrilling technical trickery and inventive editing that creates an ecstatically cinematic experience, highlighting its role as a foundation stone for modern cinema and a democratic vision of the medium. He notes its invigorating return to visual language basics despite potential naivety in its utopian outlook.

The critic praises the film's revolutionary fast-paced montage and self-reflexive structure that makes the act of filmmaking its subject. Vertov's innovative approach to editing and imagery is singled out as still fresh and influential decades later.

The review hails it as a thrilling silent masterpiece that teaches everything about cinema's possibilities through pure movement and visual trickery, noting its political and feminist elements alongside innovative techniques like fast cutting and double exposure. It emphasizes the film's purity and excitement as cinema in its rawest form.

Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent stunner is a love letter to Soviet urban life from dusk to dawn, rendered with every cinematic technique in the book. It is praised as a foundational work of creative documentary and montage.

The critic calls the restored 1929 film a dazzling firework show of symphonic montage across three cities, full of trick effects, multiple exposures and poetic pandemonium that anticipates later cinematic innovations.

The critic describes the film as an intoxicating gateway for cinephiles whose innovative editing and self-reflexive structure remain revelatory nearly a century later, while criticizing the specific Blu-ray transfer as inferior to prior restorations.

The critic calls the film a hypnotic masterpiece of Soviet avant-garde cinema, praising its daring experimental editing techniques that create a fluid, self-referential structure without plot or intertitles.

The critic praises Vertov’s experimental silent documentary as a visionary and transformative work that remains dizzying, thrilling and sexy, with punk spirit in its dense ideas and energetic transformation of reality through trick shots and self-reflexive filmmaking.

The critic hails it as one of the definitive statements on non-fiction filmmaking, still stunning today. They single out its exploration of the mechanical kino-eye revealing the patterns and rhythms of modern industrial life without reliance on intertitles or staging.

The critic describes Vertov's film as a joyful celebration of post-revolutionary Russian life captured through innovative camerawork and editing that positions the cameraman as documenter, magician and stuntman. The added Michael Nyman score enhances the frantic energy, though it occasionally overpowers the images, while the work's enduring innovation surpasses much contemporary Hollywood output.

Dziga Vertov's uncategorisable masterpiece comes to Blu-ray from Masters of Cinema. Little can be added to the praise heaped upon it over the years, other than to emphasise quite how entertaining it is to even the most casual viewer; when tempos slow down or achieve moments of dizzying catharsis, the effect is utterly disarming.