Marketa Lazarová (1967) review

War has erupted between a small faction and the King's army, with 'virginal' Marketa Lazarová (Magda Vášáryová) kidnapped in the process ... she would later fall in love with the ill-fated Mikoláš (František Velecký). Relies too heavily on intertitles for some semblance of a coherent narrative it cannot provide in any standard way - Vláčil uses every film school trick he can to 'spice up' most of the scenes, hampering such things as character development (Lazarová, the central figure, does not register as a fully-formed individual and more as an object to be controlled) and gripping storytelling. I'll admit that many of the black and white shots are stark and evocative, but a 'movie' should be more than a sum of its images. To even mention this in the same sentence as the work of Andrei Tarkovsky is an insult to the Russian master.