Faust

Doctor Faust barely seems to have a soul to sell here. Aleksandr Sokurov takes the classic story and strips the grandeur out of it: the man is hungry, in debt and curious, while the devil appears as a moneylender, repellent when undressed and otherwise entirely ordinary. The pact is not a great scene but a piece of paperwork. This closes Sokurov's tetralogy on power. The earlier films dealt with Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito; there is no particular dictator here, only the ground all of them grew from. It was shot in German. The frame is nearly square in an old ratio, and with the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel he uses anamorphic lenses to distort bodies and space deliberately. The result looks like painting and never stops being uncomfortable. It won the Golden Lion at the sixty eighth Venice film festival. The difficulty is dense philosophical dialogue, a very slow pace and crowd scenes designed to suffocate. Who it is for: viewers who follow art cinema and Sokurov. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a conventional adaptation.