Nightfall

Kelemen is an acquired taste. The little-seen Frost has acquired a near-mythic status among intellectual cinephiles. But Fate, his first (student) feature was mittel-European angst by the numbers: seedy Teutonic nihilism with an aesthetic borrowed equally from Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky. This is more of the same. Technically impressive, with its long, concerted travelling shots, slow reveals and morbid fades to black, the film still smacks of a strictly academic alienation. If someone puts a song on the radio, God knows we're going to hear it all. Every scene is an endurance test. (Sample dialogue: 'I've just raped my budgie.')