Aleksey German invites you on a journey through the madness of Stalinist Moscow. Not only is the story a journey with unexpected turns, also the cinematography evokes this sense of adventure; long shots, the camera following the footsteps of the protagonist, people wandering through the line of sight. With its incredible detailedness, a true living world emerges. A delight to watch with its rich visual languge, albeit intensive to stay focussed for 2h27m.

German chose a similar style for his equally masterful Hard to be a God (2013), which enters the realm of sci-fi and historical pictures, or Gaspar Noe's virtuoso Enter the Void (2009).

With its critical approach to the Stalinist period, German realised this film exactly at the right moment (1998): in the Soviet age, the film would have been censored, and in the Putin age Stalin was placed back on his pedestal, banning the hilarious British comedy Death of Stalin (2017), a film which through a different strategy aims to similarly show the remarkable climate of the last days of Stalin. What these two films have in common is the wish to reconstruct the absurdity and arbitrariness which governed human lives at that point, served with a dose of irony and black humour.

It's easy to slot away Khrustalyov, mashinu! as either a great and beautiful whatchamacallit, or a hopeless hodgepodge. Actually, it is about something: the Stalinist terror, and the accumulated guilty consciences of the Russians - even many of his victims - after living for a generation under his thumb.

General Klensky (Yuri Tsurilo, in a stunning performance) is a "good" Russian - a doctor who has achieved a position of power and respect under Stalin while, he thinks, maintaining his honor and humanity. That delicate balancing act comes undone when he finds out that he's on the hit list during the "doctors' plot," Stalin's final purge. German's film captures the growing absurdity of trying to rationalize life under a beast like Stalin: His principal characters' lives (and brains) have become as cluttered and confused with attempts to make sense of their own conduct in the face of tyranny as the crazy, stuffed-to-the-gills, attic-like warrens of rooms they live in.

Russia at the end of Stalin is a squalid sprawl of these absurdist dwellings, with only the sinister black cars of the party apparats representing any kind of order, and that the most brutal kind. The violence creeps into everyone's lives, as we watch German's characters slap and spit at and sometimes sexually assault each other. Sometimes it's deadly, sometimes in jest, but always a kind of emanation of the violence visited on them from the terrible man who pulls all the strings.

Millions of people lived under a system something like this in the 20th Century, and German's film is great because it captures so much of the absurdity and brutality they experienced. It shows you how they lived through it, and also how the subterfuges that helped them to do so could often turn around and bite them back - making their survival tactics ultimately useless against the terror. Life under Stalin was a desperate balancing act, represented here by the game of balancing a drink on one's head that one of the minor characters and then, at the end, Klensky himself engage in.

With Khrustalyov, mashinu! it's hard to know where to hand the most praise: The art direction is staggering. All the performances are perfect. The direction is supple and endlessly perceptive. The B&W cinematography is gorgeous. There are signs of the influence of Orson Welles' films circa the 1960s, and especially of Welles' The Trial, with its characters moving through the cluttered warrens of rooms in the Gare St. Lazare. The way German choses to view his characters also reminds me of Bela Tarr's work. But German is a master and Khrustalyov, mashinu! is an astonishing artistic vision of a terrible time in human history.

clearly, this is a film for which either one votes 10 or votes 3. Those artsy folks will hail it a great feat, and those folks that wish to be entertained will walk out of the theather. A black and white film, the titles appear only after about 10 minutes of pivoting plots, kind of reminded me how the titles suddenly appeared in Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time the West". The random appearence of people's faces from left and right, some emerging from sauna tubs, others from foggy and steamy rooms, reminds Fellini's Otto e Mezzo. And much of the interiors, people's musings on everyday life, and the "life goes on" quality of city life, reminds the graphic novel by Ben Katchor, "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer". On the absurbist twists and plots, "The Nose" by Gogol comes to mind, and the slight fantastic world (look out for those umbrellas suddenly popping open) brings Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita". Rich (but senseless) plot, lots of takes, lots of baroquely enriched interiors, outdoor scenes of streets in snowy winter and the muffled sound of cars rolling on snow. Even the title is random: a sentence one hears being yelled by one of the many many characters. Now, if Francesco Rosi's "La Tregua" had a bit of this randomness and absurbist quality to give more of the feel of directionless of war's end, it would have been great.