Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours. I'd be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life.

Taking its structural cues from the form of the tango, Tarr’s epic masterpiece visualizes the devil’s dance in circling camera movements and long takes reminiscent of countryman Miklós Jancsó. Considered one of the most important and remarkable films of the past few decades, it neverthless remains little seen, and this extraordinary experience of viewing the film in its seven and a half hour entirety is not to be missed. From its riveting opening shot, which follows a herd of cows wandering and mating its way through a village, to its hour long study of an aging doctor’s (German writer Peter Berling) drunken trek to the pub to refill his flask, Sátántangó is “sarcastic to the core;” its story of a group of farmers on a failing collective who await the arrival of a Messiah “demands to be read as a kind of interim report on where humanity seems to be lodged—in a quagmire of cowardice, betrayal, selfdelusion, alcoholism, and deceit” (Rosenbaum).