Béla Tarr’s follow-up to his monumental 1994 masterpiece Sátántangó is another dark fable featuring stunning b&w cinematography and extremely long takes. Set in a nameless, timeless Hungarian hamlet that’s visited one day by a mysterious traveling circus replete with an enormous stuffed whale, the film employs only 39 shots to chronicle how the circus’s much-heralded, demagogue-like star attraction, “The Prince,” sparks violence and destruction in the village. From a novel by Sátántangó author and Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai, who co-wrote the script. “An apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.” –Janus Films. “The best film of 2001.” –Susan Sontag. “Werckmeister Harmonies is subtle and gradual in the way that the unsettling atmosphere becomes undeniable. It feels like the merging of a Biblical and political apocalypse with the whale seemingly evoking references of a Leviathan” –Sarah Vincent. With Hanna Schygulla.