This is how a writer in the Village Voice recently began a review of the work of Lithuanian filmmaker Sarunas Bartas:

“A voice from the frontier of both post-post-industrial civilization and art-film reductionism, Lithuanian film-maker Sarunas Bartas may be the ultimate litmus test for hardcore cineastes. His films represent a polar cap of inhospitable cinematic ordeal – they withhold orthodox pleasures so strenuously you imagine the filmmaker as a marching ascetic, disgusted with a decadent movie world. A Bartas film rarely moves, and is never host to more than a few moments of inconsequential dialogue – you arrive long after life has already wound down into hopeless silence.”

Popcorn anyone?