"Actor: Karel Mares"

• The Party And The Guests | DVD | (19/03/2007) from £11.25   |  Saving you £1.74 (15.47%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Distinguished by being ""banned forever"" in its native Czech Republic Jan Nemec's ""A Report on the Party"" is a great film from the flowering of the Czech cinema in the 1960s. It is a political thriller that satirizes unquestionable conformity. A group of happy picnickers are accosted by a group of strangers led by a bullying sadist who has an unbreakable hold over his followers. After he interrogates one of them a stranger then invites everyone to a nonsensical but elegant and formal banquet outdoors. Nemec documents the process of self-deception and rationalization which lead to an acceptance of constrant; free will and freedom are seen as difficult to maintain and easily discarded. The affair is bizarre and ends when one of the guests (played by film director Evald Schorm) chooses not to remain and escapes. His compatriots agree that he must be recaptured and so the group arms themselves ready to hunt him down...

• Audition / Talent Show (Konkurs) | DVD | (15/08/2005) from £11.45   |  Saving you £1.54 (13.45%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Part one cuts between rehearsals/performance by rival brass bands and the competing attraction of a cross-country motorbike race. Part Two anticipates the audition scenes in Taking Off as a throng of female singers try out for a part in a show. Though originally made as separate featurettes the two episodes form a plausible entity being so similar stylistically and thematically. The approach is documentary with some fictional elements gently interpolated - in the first the defection of two youthful trombonists in the second the lightly sketched backgrounds of two of the singers. Extremely assured for an apprentice work this displays the same mix of shrewdness and tenderness that marked all Forman's early films. But as with many East European movies of this era one suspects that a political allegory is concealed at the heart of it all.