Rise of the Conqueror review – Gladiator meets throat singing as Mongol hordes ride out

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Christian Mortensen takes up arms as the 14th-century kingmaker Timur but could do with a stronger force behind him and a better beard in front The western-produced Greco-Judeo-Roman epic has been with us since early cinema, while the Chinese film industry kept the eastern end up with a string of recent historical pictures. But what about the lands in between? Apart from a smattering of pictures about Genghis Khan, including John Wayne’s regrettable appearance in 1956’s The Conqueror , the Mongol hordes have not exactly ravaged the box office. So it’s refreshing to see Rise of the Conqueror sally forth, with Christian Mortensen in the saddle as the 14th-century Turkic-Mongol chieftain Timur . This is basically Gladiator with added throat-singing. Man-at-arms Timur is a kingmaker caught between his native Barlas tribe, which includes his testy brother-in-law Hussayn (Mahesh Jadu) who’s eager to reclaim his family’s rule in Samarkand; on the other side is occupying Mongol warmonger Tuglu...
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Landscapes of Resistance review – an enigmatic meditation on a life marked by Auschwitz

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This documentary by Serbian-born director Marta Popivoda is a mildly psychedelic drift into the horror of one woman’s deportation and determined survival

Much of this Serbian documentary uses a striking, mildly psychedelic technique: a super-slow dissolve between images that morph near-imperceptibly into the next. Cracks in rendered rural walls appear to shift and Balkan forest vegetation undergoes subtle mutations, as the film’s subject, nonagenarian Sofia Vujanovic, recalls her past in voiceover: one of Tito’s partisans, her wartime activities and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz. It’s as if an ineluctable force – history – is moving through the material world, warping and reshaping it.

These tectonics operate on human flesh too: Vujanovic’s Auschwitz tattoo has slipped down her forearm as the years have gone by. Purpose still weighting her words, she recounts her journey into activism: she was attracted to communism by progressive classmates in the countryside; cherrypicked as a cell leader during the second world war because being a woman allowed her to escape attention; and then sickened by taking her first life, an SS officer during a raid on a supply train. Vujanovic was then captured, tortured and shipped off into darkness in Poland, with Czechoslovak railwaymen taunting the prisoners en route: “Gas, gas!” She thought they were being sent to work at a gas-processing plant.

Landscapes of Resistance is available on True Story on 2 February.

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