When legendary Russian auteur Aleksei German died in 2013, he left behind this extraordinary final film. Hard To Be A God tosses us into the morally bankrupt planet of Arkanar, a Fellini-esque version of the Middle Ages packed with desperate mangled humans covered in mud, rain, shit, and snot - and pretty much leaves us to fend for ourselves. Eschewing plot for visceral immersion, this massive, decades-in-the-making cinematic achievement, with shots that defy the limits of physical possibility, is in many ways the final relic of the medium not as it exists today but as it was in the age of Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Welles, and Bergman. “God, if you exist, stop me.”