Geza Balkay Movies

Bela Tarr follows up on his seven-hour epic Satantango, considered by some critics as one of the finest films of the 1990s, with this elegant, haunting work about the cycles of violence that have dogged Eastern European history. Jancos (Lars Rudolph) is a wide-eyed innocent who works as an occasional postal worker and as a caretaker for Mr. Ezster (Peter Fitz). An outsider and a visionary, he marvels at the miracles of creation, from the planets rotating in the heavens to the sundry animals on earth. One day, a circus featuring jars full of medical anomalies and a massive dead whale entombed in a corrugated metal trailer visits Jancos' economically depressed village. Another more sinister attraction is a shadowy figure dubbed "The Prince," whose nihilist rants incite the town's disaffected to riot. Not long afterwards, Mrs. Ezster (Hanna Schygulla) cajoles her estranged husband to join a citizen's action group against the circus, threatening to move back into his house if he doesn't play along. Tension in the town builds until, after one of The Prince's hate-filled speeches, throngs of angry men with blunt instruments ransack and brutalize a men's hospital ward. When the dust clears, lives are irrevocably changed. This film was screened at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

Without apparent connections between them, the maker of this experimental film alleges that there is a story in the series of incidents which punctuate this movie, aside from the fact that they all take place in a rural village. In one, Children explore their sexual feelings together; in another, a married man and his wife have a tiff and then make love, but then the wife is found dead. Coming in from the city by hitchhiking, a young man is visiting his mother for the summer. All these potentially related stories are interspersed with scenes from a black-and-white African documentary. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

This historical drama chronicles the struggle of Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg (Stella Skarsgard), as he fought valiantly to save the lives of the Jewish residents of Nazi-occupied Budapest. ~ Iotis Erlewine, Rovi

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a taciturn law-enforcement officer from Russia. James Belushi co-stars as a wise-lipped Chicago cop. Though they go together like caviar and White Castles, they are forced to team up to collar the Soviet Union's most notorious drug lord. Thus does director Walter Hill recycle his 48 Hours formula for another unlikely star team. Unfortunately, Red Heat isn't half as enjoyable as the earlier film, owing to a lack of rapport between the two leading men and an overall lack of inspiration infecting the whole project. The one notable aspect of Red Heat is that it was the first commercial American film to stage scenes in Moscow's Red Square. Watch for Laurence Fishburne (still billed as "Larry") in a secondary role. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this noir romance, Wolf is involved in the illegal distribution of foreign videotapes and VCRs and has been having an affair with a beautiful ballerina. She has been two-timing him with an English choreographer. One of the women he hires to dub foreign tapes into Hungarian is middle-aged, not a sexpot type at all. However, there is some sexual magnetism between them, and when he turns to her for first-aid after he is beat up by some gangster types he has crossed, they have their first and they soon think, only sexual encounter. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi