Exclusive Boston premiere tonight and tomorrow at the Brattle!

“His hands are in blood and he is in blood” — so says one schmutz-spattered gladiator of another in Hard to Be a God, Aleksey German’s posthumously completed, hyper-violent magnum opus, an ultra-grueling SF allegory (based on a novel by the Tarkovsky-anointed Strugatsky brothers) set on an alien planet mired in a permanent simulacrum of Medieval darkness. Revered by film-nuts fortunate enough to have seen his earlier work, German has been criminally underscreened here in the States, which only makes this two-day area premiere all the more thrilling.