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Reviews
Le colonel Chabert (1994)
Disappointing adaptation of a great story
Le Colonel Chabert is a great novella -- you can read it in a couple of hours. It's better than this disappointing film, which moves slowly and ends differently, less satisfyingly, and more confusingly. A lot of good Balzac dialogue was missing, and the extra details added were unnecessary. Balzac this ain't.
Gibel Otrara (1992)
Good but long war movie
It's been about 10 years since I saw this movie (I saw it shortly before it came out) -- it's about the conquest of the town of Otrar, in central Asia, by the Mongols in the Middle Ages. It's something like four hours long, but it's good. Dialogue is in Kazakh.
Also, Ardak Amirkulov is one of the directors of the "New Kazakh Wave." This is a group of Kazakh directors who studied under the Russian filmmaker Sergei Solovyov (director of The House Under the Starry Sky (Dom pod zvyodznym nebom) (1991)), and includes Yermek Shinarbayev, who directed the interesting movie Revenge (Mest) (1989).