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Sergei Prokofiev was one of the preeminent late 19th and early 20th century classical composers. He is highly regarded for his innovative, unique approach to music that blends traditional classical music with modern, contemporary elements.

Prokofiev’s musical genius is evident in his works, from his ballets and operas to his symphonies and concertos. His works are characterized by their use of driving rhythms, dissonance, atonality and a great sense of drama that draws the listener in. His use of experimentation makes his music stand out from the traditional classical repertoire.

In this blog post, we will explore some of Prokofiev’s work, providing insight into the life of this master composer and how he revolutionized modern classical music. We will discuss his works in detail, as well as the musical techniques he used to create such incredible compositions.

Early Life and Education of Sergei Prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev was born...

By Darren Allison

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For anyone with a remote interest in soundtrack music, they will probably have some knowledge of how difficult it is to secure the rights to Stanley Kubrick’s film music. Permission has been basically refused and the whole issue is generally tied up in a bundle of tightly wrapped red tape.

Whilst there is still a great demand for these scores, the slow and unsuccessful process has left the fan base both frustrated and in limbo. It’s not that there hasn’t been a gallant effort; fans/producers such as the respected and much admired Nick Redman have taken up the challenge, but alas to no avail. As a result, the Kubrick soundtrack sagas remain something of an impregnable and stubborn wall to penetrate.

I can’t therefore condemn entirely the efforts of some labels and their attempts to...

Let us look back at the history of Russian propaganda films. The standard-bearer must be Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 “Alexander Nevsky,” a Stalinist-era epic centered on the hero Prince Alexander, who drove out the Romans in the 13th century. The barely-veiled subtext of that film, however, was a depiction of Russo-German relations as the war loomed ahead, with a call to arms for citizens and a clear warning to would-be attackers. I’ve no idea how effective it was at reaching its propagandistic goals, but the film itself is gorgeous and filled with inventive effects, and Eisenstein accomplished at least the feat of cinematic excellence.

Flash forward to 2018, and the quality of Russian propaganda films has fallen dramatically. Case in point: “Maximum Impact,” a joint Russian-American action comedy about a top-secret summit meeting between the American secretary of state and Russian head of state, with the goal of shoring up relations between the two countries.

Here's a great fan-made video created by Darth Blender that shows us what the classic 80s cartoon series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe would have been like had it been made in the 1940s as a live-action film. This video actually turned out really cool and it's fun to see the films that the creator used to create this trailer. I especially enjoyed the characters from the old films that were used for the He-Man villains. They all worked so perfectly! I included a list of films used to cut this trailer together below the video. If you're a fan of He-Man, you're going to get a kick out of this!

The films uses include:

Birds of Paradise (1932)

The Lost Jungle (1934)

Mad Love (1935)

Flash Gordon (1938)

Alexander Nevsky (1938)

The Wolfman (1941)

Spy Smasher (1942)

The Crimson Ghost (1946)

The Lost Continent (1949)

Captain Z-Ro (1951 - 1956)

The Lost Planet (1953)

Creature from the Black Lagoon...

In The Overlook, A.V. Club film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky examines the misfits, underappreciated gems, and underseen classics of film history.

No movie made in the 1940s is quite like The Iron Crown, Alessandro Blasetti’s sumptuous fantasy epic of one-eyed barbarians, glittering suits of spiky armor, and pseudo-medieval exotica. It’s sort of a blockbuster avant la lettre, very violent and lovably cheesy, closer in aesthetics and spirit to the likes of Krull and Conan The Barbarian than to the costume and fairy-tale movies of its era. In the context of film history, one might call it the midpoint between the spectacular epics of the golden age of Italian silent film and the wondrously corny Italian sword-and-sandal cheapies of the early 1960s—or perhaps an attempt by Blasetti, a student of Soviet film, to outdo Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Alexander Nevsky. But it’s much stranger than that. The...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question:

Last Friday saw the release of Garth Davis’ “Lion,” the musical score for which is the gorgeous result of a collaboration between two giants of the neo-classical movement, Dustin O’Halloran and Hauschka. It’s just the latest indication that we’re living in a fascinating, vibrant time for movie music, and December boasts a number of films that will only add more fuel to that fire. With that in mind, we asked our panel of critics to name their favorite film score of the 21st Century.

Tasha Robinson (@TashaRobinson), The Verge

There are some really striking contenders out there, topped by Susumu Hirasawa’s manic,...

Exclusive: Feature to recount the story of the key figure in Russian history.

Two-time Oscar-nominee Michael Radford (Il Postino – The Postman) is attached to direct historical epic Alexander Nevsky for Manuela Noble’s Wacha Films.

Radford penned the ambitious project’s screenplay, based on the real life man, who is considered one of the key figures in Russian history.

Born as a prince, Nevsky fled his home after his brother was murdered by crusaders, but he returned to lead his people into battle on multiple fronts, uniting the principalities of the medieval territory into what we now know as Russia. His actions led him to be canonized as a saint by the Orthodox Church.

The film promises both large-scale battle scenes on land and sea, as well a romantic plot between Nevsky and a warrior princess. The producers are in Cannes seeking potential partners for the big-budget project.

Nevsky was previously depicted in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 feature...

We’re talking remakes again, and this time we’re dissecting not one but two popular films which were done previously as a single movie. This week, Cinelinx looks at Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Ever since J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic book trilogy first came out in the 50s’ there had been talk of adapting it into film but the epic scope of the story often deterred filmmakers of the era from taking on the task. In the early 70’s, director John Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur) wanted to do a condensed 100-minute version of the whole trilogy but that plan fell apart.

Then, animator/producer Ralph Bakshi (American Pop, Cool World) unveiled his idea to do a two-part adaptation of the trilogy in animated form. Since Tolkien’s daughter was a huge fan of Bakshi’s previous...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Hard to Be a God is playing on Mubi in the Us through January 2.Hard to Be a GodRussian director Aleksei German spent the final 15 years of his life working on Hard To Be A God (2013), a brutal medieval epic adapted from a 1964 novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strutgatsky, dying just before he could complete the job in February 2013. Happily, his son and widow were able to oversee the final sound mix. The result is one of the most immersive and harrowing cinematic experiences going, three hours of being put to the sword and mired in the mud, blood and viscera of a nightmare alternate reality.Although German's characters are dressed in the clanking armour, chainmail and robes of the European Middle Ages, Hard To Be A God is in fact set on a distant planet,...

It's been half a decade since we last heard from Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj. In 2010 he followed his feature debut Acné with the small, elegiac and lovely A Useful Life, about an aging cinematheque programmer in Montevideo. If you, like myself, have often wondered when we’d get another cinematic novella from this observant, sensitive filmmaker, the answer is now: the director has returned with The Apostate, another modest and deceptively tidy character study of an out-of-sorts, out-of-time man. Gonzalo Tamayo, played with a sleepy-eyed, disheveled and lax handsomeness by non-professional Alvaro Ogalla, decides to apostatize from the Spanish Catholic church. After being raised (involuntarily, Gonzalo says) Catholic by his parents, failing at seemingly every stage of his education, pining for his beautiful cousin who’s already in a relationship, and running vaguely illicit-seeming errands for his never-seen father, Gonzalo seems sick of it all—and his act of rebellion...

Dear Fernando,Minotaur is the kind of film we’re able to see at such a big festival as Toronto only because adventurous programming strands like Wavelengths have the patience to present their unique tempo within the hectic atmosphere of the surrounding festivities. And its tempo is indeed unique, evoked through the opiated, satin haze of its digital photography. Two young men and a young woman, bohemian occupants of a Mexico City apartment, lounge, inactive and increasingly beset by a crushing sleepiness. Long takes in widescreen fragment their flat, making its space mysterious and jagged. The few other people who interact with this somnolent trio are all helpers, servants or delivery men, the dialog almost all functional, except for excerpts of a book read out loud periodically about a misremembered or perhaps never-happened meeting. You feel echoes of Last Year in Marienbad and also perhaps Marguerite Duras’s India Song,...

Locarno's announced that Otar Iosseliani’s Chant d’hiver has been added to the lineup of its upcoming 68th edition. And Bertrand Tavernier will not only receive a Golden Lion in Venice for his lifetime achievement, he'll also be the Guest Director of Venice Classics, which has announced a first round of 21 restorations including Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard, Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, Federico Fellini's Amarcord, Claude Chabrol's Le beau Serge, Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait, Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Boys from Feng-kuei, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. » - David Hudson...

Locarno's announced that Otar Iosseliani’s Chant d’hiver has been added to the lineup of its upcoming 68th edition. And Bertrand Tavernier will not only receive a Golden Lion in Venice for his lifetime achievement, he'll also be the Guest Director of Venice Classics, which has announced a first round of 21 restorations including Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard, Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, Federico Fellini's Amarcord, Claude Chabrol's Le beau Serge, Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait, Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Boys from Feng-kuei, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. » - David Hudson...

Peter Greenaway, director of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, is debuting his latest film about legendary Director Sergei Eisenstein at the 65th Annual Berlinale, or the Berlin International Film Festival.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato joins Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence among the slate of films at 2015′s festival.

Eisenstein was the Russian born director of the silent masterpiece Battleship Potemkin among other classics such as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II. In 1932, Eisenstein released ¡Que viva Mexico!, for which he traveled to Guanajuato, Mexico and experienced desires of love, sex and death that shaped the rest of his career following his early Russian successes.

Here’s the full synopsis of the film, via a press release:

In 1931, at the height of his artistic powers, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein travels to Mexico to shoot a new...

The 16th edition of the Mumbai Film Festival announced its line-up in a press conference today.

Here is the complete list of films which will be screened at the festival:-

International Competition

Difret

Dir.: Zeresenay Berhane Mehari (Ethiopia / 2014 / Col / 99)

History of Fear (Historia del miedo)

Dir.: Benjamin Naishtat (Argentina-France-Germany-Qatar-Uruguay / 2014 / Col / 79)

With Others (Ba Digaran)

Dir.: Nasser Zamiri (Iran / 2014 / Col / 85)

The Tree (Drevo)

Dir.: Sonja Prosenc (Slovenia / 2014 / Col / 90)

Next to Her (At li layla)

Dir.: Asaf Korman (Israel / 2014 / Col / 90)

Schimbare

Dir.: Alex Sampayo (Spain / 2014 / Col / 87)

Fever

Dir.: Raphaël Neal (France / 2014 / Col / 81)

Court

Dir.: Chaitanya Tamhane (India (Marathi-Gujarati-English-Hindi) / 2014 / Col / 116)

Macondo

Dir.: Sudabeh Mortezai (Austria / 2014 / Col / 98)

India Gold Competition 2014

The Fort (Killa)

Dir.: Avinash Arun (India (Marathi) / 2014 / Col / 107)

Unto the Dusk

Dir.: Sajin Baabu (India (Malayalam) / 2014 / Col / 118)

Names Unknown (Perariyathavar)

Dir.: Dr. Biju (India (Malayalam) / 2014 / Col / 110)

Buddha In a Traffic Jam

Dir.

Most of this year's Oscar contenders are based on historical events – and there are academics waiting to pounce on every slip-up and blunder. But there is more to a great movie than getting the facts straight

• Top 10 biopics

• Alex von Tunzelmann's Reel History series

It's Oscars time again, and this year many of the big contenders have one thing in common. Two thirds of the contenders for best film are based on historical events. History also picks up four out of five best actor nominations, two out of five best actresses, and three out of five directors. So fierce has the competition among historical films become that it was reported that academic "history assassins" were paid handsomely by marketing consultants to spot errors in other studios' films. These errors would then be filtered out subtly through blogs, undermining rivals' Oscar hopes.

It was rumoured that sniping about the liberties...

Feature Ivan Radford 30 Sep 2013 - 07:03

Ivan gives the soundtrack from Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine a listen, and provides a rundown of the filmmaker's 10 best music moments...

You can tell immediately when you're watching a Woody Allen movie. Not just from the opening credits (Windsor Light Condensed on black title cards) but from the music. Woody loves the stuff - he'd rather play clarinet with his band than go to the Oscars. He loves it so much that he joins the list of directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese who are known for using popular, pre-existing music in their soundtracks. The man has directed an astonishing 43 films in his career. Just seven of those have original scores.

Allen started his career with none other than Marvin Hamlisch, who would go on to score The Spy Who Loved Me. Working on Bananas after Take The Money And Run,...

One advantage of writing an article on experimental film as opposed to avant-garde film is that it automatically gives one much more leeway in terms of films to be selected as well as overall writing approaches. While “avant-garde cinema” can be regarded, by and large, as a distinct body of work with its own traditions, history, and critical literature, “experimental film” is a rather more subjective and ambiguous category, and one that cuts across certain forms of commercial as well as avant-garde filmmaking.

Hopefully this list will entice you to watch one or two—or five—of these essential experimental films…

5. Battleship Potemkin

“Battleship Potemkin” (1925) is no longer my favourite Sergei Eisenstein film (I’d take “October” or “Alexander Nevsky”), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking about Eisenstein. The film records the birth of revolutionary consciousness among the crew members of the battleship Potemkin,...

What chilled most about murder mystery Mayday was the claim of an ancestral right to wear green man makeup

You'd naturally think Aidan Gillen killed Hattie, the 14-year-old May Queen, in the woods above the village. Ever since he played transgressive super-hottie Stuart in Queer as Folk, he's worked sneering lips and leering eyes as a series of reptiles, chancers and scumbags – dodgy mayor in The Wire, slimy counsellor in Game of Thrones, venal banker in credit-crunch drama Freefall. Why not add murderer to the list?

In Mayday (BBC1), he's similarly sinister: a bad dad who thumps his son for nothing and buries his grief over his dead wife in video game marathons. Plus he has a mysterious bag locked in a cupboard. Could it be a body-bag full of May Queen? Possibly. Harold Pinter called Gillen "dangerous" when he was in The Caretaker, which is damning evidence. The prosecution rests,...

While guys like Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas spent the 1970s reinventing live action moviemaking, animation had just one lone figure toiling away. Ralph Bakshi, trained on Terrytoons and involved in 1960s television animation, began exploring the possibilities of animated features in the shadow of Walt Disney’s death. His Fritz the Cat made people sit up and take notice, followed by Heavy Traffic, and Coonskin – urban, funky, raw tales set in a familiar world.

After that, he set his sights on something fantastic and gave us, in 1976, Wizards. I’ve been waiting for this film to be restored, cleaned up, and released on Blu-ray given its visual artistry and fun story. Finally, 20th Century Home Entertainment has released it for the film’s 35th Anniversary and they’ve given it a handsome treatment. Encased in a hardcover case with a 24-page booklet, the Blu-ray is striking to watch.

Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films from Criterion

Photo: Criterion Last week in my On DVD Today column I mentioned how the folks at Criterion were clearing off their shelves and offering every item in stock at a 40% discount while supplies lasted. I would assume a majority of the folks that read the article ignored that link since it didn't have any new information on Batman, Iron Man or any other kind of man from a comic book. However, I am hoping this headline brought in the folks that may be interested in such a deal. Of course, the hour is late and the majority of the titles are now gone as the deal ends Monday, November 24, at midnight Est. When I first got the email from Criterion I shuffled over to check out a few titles I had been longing to get and had never wanted to spend the money.