The result is a technically astonishing mixture of optimistic Stalinist kitsch, agitprop and the epic Soviet style of the Twenties.
Comment
01/27/07
I Am Cuba (1964)
100 %
Reviews Counted: 30 Fresh: 30 Rotten:0 Average Rating: 8.7/10
Runtime: 3 hrs 20 mins
Synopsis: This Russian-made study of Cuba, partially written by renowned poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, captures the island just before it made the transition to a post-revolutionary society. Moving from city to country and back again, I AM CUBA examines the various problems caused by political... [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Jean Bouise
Director: Mikhail Kalatozov
Screenwriter: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Enrique Pineda Barnet
Composer: Carlos Farinas
Screenwriter: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Enrique Pineda Barnet
Composer: Carlos Farinas
Reviews
Politically naïve maybe, but it works beautifully as straight cinema.
12/30/06
Top Critic
Cinema’s singular dream, so often betrayed elsewhere, is to deliver such visions as this.
02/09/06
Top Critic Top Critic
A work of dazzling cinematographic invention that still has the ability to astound.
11/26/02
It's a vibrant, joyous piece of technical accomplishment that's probably one of the most relentlessly innovative films you'll ever see.
11/22/02
Top Critic
A memorably eccentric and lyrical hymn to the transformatory powers of cinema.
03/05/02
Politics, propaganda and poetry are whipped into an exotic cinematic cocktail in Mikhail Kalatozov's delirious tribute to the Cuban revolution...
02/05/08
Being suppressed by those who wanted [I Am Cuba] made in the first place is a vindication of sorts. Mere propaganda only reinforces the status quo. True art is revolutionary.
12/12/07
This loony, quasi-masterpiece is one of the great jagged edges of film history.
11/29/07
visual impressions that will forever remain embedded in your mind's eye%u2014just as much as Picasso's La Guernica communicates the horrors of war
11/23/07
a chest-thumping source of pride for the Soviet government, full of inciting imagery, enormous filmmaking prowess and the flavor of revolution
11/20/07
I Am Cuba is a cinephile's wet dream, a collage of Herculean feats of technical wizardry that would be easy to dismiss if it wasn't so humane.
11/17/07
Some of the most exhilarating camera movements and most luscious black-and-white cinematography you'll ever see inhabit this singular, delirious 141-minute communist propaganda epic.
09/17/07
The film is immensely entertaining and occasionally inspiring, a delirious combination of Slavic solemnity, Latin exoticism, Communist idealism and breathtakingly beautiful images. It is best enjoyed on the big screen.
08/29/06
Top Critic
It is one of the most visually hypnotic films ever -- and that's not hyperbole.
09/30/05
The resulting assault is so epicly impassioned it's less about Cuba per se than the fusillade of movement, shadow, light, vertigo, and landscape on the viewer's tender optic nerves.
09/13/05
It is a dream of life in which everything is reduced to black and white. Or as the rhetoric used to go, you are either part of the problem or part of the solution. Nothing was ever quite that simple.
01/15/05
Top Critic
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