October, LSO, Strobel, Barbican review - Eisenstein with steel score

★★★★ OCTOBER, LSO, STROBEL, BARBICAN Eisenstein with steel score

A head-spinning two hours with baroque imagery and heavy-metal music of 1927-8

Forget the ersatz experience of Sergey Eisenstein's mighty silent films accompanied by slabs of Shostakovich symphonies composed years later. This collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and Kino Klassika is as close as we can ever come to hearing the massive score composed by Austrian-born Edmund Meisel for the greatest of the master's 1920s films. It was intended for large-scale screenings of October in Berlin and Moscow, which never took place in the expected format.

Coming soon: trailers to the next big films

COMING SOON: TRAILERS TO THE NEXT BIG FILMS Dive into a moreish new feature on theartsdesk

Get a sneak preview of major forthcoming movies

Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).

AUGUST

DVD/Blu-ray: Der müde Tod

Stunning images and lavish detail in Fritz Lang's four interlinked fantasies

"Weary Death" – "Destiny", the English-language title, is weak by comparison – settles in a small German town, an impressive simulation constructed on a back lot of the Babelsberg Studio outside Berlin. He buys a plot in the churchyard, builds himself a dwelling with an impenetrable wall around it and casts his blight over a young betrothed couple, hoping that the young woman can conquer him and bring him respite from his wretched duty.

Blu-ray: Early Murnau

BLU-RAY: EARLY MURNAU Five films from the great German director offer insights into his inconsistency

Five films from the great German director offer insights into his inconsistency

“FW Murnau’s work is, at first glance, the most varied, even inconsistent, of the great German cineastes.” Those are the opening words of film critic David Cairns's What Will You Be Tomorrow? an extra conceived for Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925, a new three-disc Blu-ray box set of the director’s early films. After watching them, it’s clear that what might seem a contentious statement is spot on.

DVD: Shooting Stars

The British silent classic that lifted the lid on moviemaking

Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Asquith didn’t call the shots on the silent movie that launched his distinguished directorial career, but the screenplay he co-wrote with JOC Orton included elaborate scenarist notes that told his designated co-director, AV Bramble, exactly what he intended. It was a gamble that paid off – 1927’s Shooting Stars proved a dazzling combination of tragicomedy and early docudrama, its subject being life in a film studio (Cricklewood in North London).

The Magic Flute, Komische Oper Berlin, Edinburgh Festival Theatre

THE MAGIC FLUTE, KOMISCHE OPER BERLIN, EDINBURGH FESTIVAL THEATRE A magical Flute, but an insufficiently human one

A magical Flute, but an insufficiently human one

In 2007, a tiny British theatre company called 1927 staged their first ever show at the Edinburgh Fringe – the darkly reimagined collection of fairytales and fables Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Now, almost a decade on, they are back where it all began – not at the Fringe but the Edinburgh International Festival, with their acclaimed Komische Oper production of The Magic Flute.

The Associates, Sadler's Wells

THE ASSOCIATES, SADLER'S WELLS Crystal Pite's reworked duet pips premières from Kate Prince and Hofesh Shechter

Crystal Pite's reworked duet pips premières from Kate Prince and Hofesh Shechter

The Associates is not the title of a new Scandi crime drama, though in dance world terms we’re perhaps approaching that level of Event. Associates are what Sadler’s Wells, London’s dance powerhouse, calls the selected band of dancemakers it deems serioulsy interesting, and worth co-commissioning.

DVD: Spione

DVD: SPIONE Proto-Bond silent spy movie with virtuoso set-pieces from Fritz Lang

Proto-Bond silent spy movie with virtuoso set-pieces from Fritz Lang

If you have trouble grasping all the plot-lines of Fritz Lang’s 1928 silent thriller, fear not: they’re chimerical, existing only to display all the accoutrements of a spy-movie genre which Lang is credited with having launched. All paths lead to the sinister Lenin-Trotsky visage of master-spy Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, slickly transformed from his villainous roles in the Doctor Mabuse films and Metropolis). The essence is a love-triangle between him, the infinitely various Sonja Barnikowa of Gerda Maurus, Russian exile at his command, and “No.