Runaway Train
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
Two prisoners who have escaped from a maximum-security prison in Alaska board a train. They soon discover that the train driver has died of a heart attack and that nothing can stop the locomotive as it journeys across the frozen wilderness. Based on an original screenplay by Akira Kurosawa, it was written with the help of the Japanese filmmaker’s collaborators, Hideo Oguni and Ryūzō Kikushima. In this epic ride, which is both formidably effective and imbued with lyricism, savagery and humanity go hand in hand.
Andrei Konchalovsky
Andrei Konchalovsky is a Russian film and theatre director, screenwriter, and producer. His filmmaking career spans over 60 years in Soviet, Hollywood, and contemporary Russian cinema. Early in his career, he was a screenwriting collaborator of Andrei Tarkovsky. During the 1980's, he resided in the United States, where he notably directed Runaway Train (1985), based on a script by Akira Kurosawa.
