Vladimir Erenberg

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.

A portrait of the era of "Red Terror" during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, The Seventh Companion offers a character study in General Adamov (Andrei Popov), a law professor in the tsarist army, who is incarcerated by the Bolshevik secret police along with many other members of the bourgeoisie. Finally released into the new world of the Soviet Union, the resigned officer finds that he has lost everything from his old life except a mantel clock that he carries through the night from place to place, until he ends up back where he started.

Рассказ о простой вещи

Three friends in a summer camp are looking for a treasure hidden in a old mansion.

Russian film transplanting the tragic tale of Donald Crowhurst into then-contemporary anti-capitalist thought.

Великое противостояние

A biographical film about the life of the great Russian scientist, inventor of rocket technology and the founder of theoretical astronautics — Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the hard spiritual work of the thinker, overcoming the stagnation of the surrounding and dramatic events of his family life.

The film is based on a true dramatic story of the fate of a wonderful Russian woman - Countess Yulia Petrovna Vrevskaya, one of the first Petersburg beauties. The events of the movie take place during the Russian-Turkish war for the liberation of the Bulgarian people from the Turkish yoke. An early widowed baroness, having left Petersburg, and having invested all her money in organizing a volunteer sanitary detachment, she becomes a sister of mercy on the front of the Bulgarian war with the Ottoman Empire of 1878.

Who was the first to bring the great novel "12 Chairs" to the screen? You say "Leonid Gaidai" - and it will be a mistake. In our country, the first director was Alexander Belinsky (Leningrad television, 1966). Filming the favorite books of millions is a difficult task. The audience knows the plot in detail. Winged phrases have long gone to the people. Everyone has their own idea of ​​the main characters. In general, dissatisfied will be sure. So the version of "12 chairs", proposed by Alexander Belinsky, of course, will not suit everyone.

Верный робот

In the Siberian taiga village of Wolf's Burrows, the Strogov family lives — Matvey with his wife Anna and his parents. Through the fate of this peasant family, a picture of the life of the Siberian region during major historical events — the Russo-Japanese War, the 1905 Revolution, the October Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War is outlined.

An art film about the life of Soviet creatives in the late 1980s.

On holiday in Yalta, Muscovite banker Dimitri Gurov contrives to meet a young woman who walks her dog. She’s Anna Sergeyevna, trapped in a loveless marriage to a lackey. He’s unhappy in an arranged marriage. With neither spouse at hand, Dimitri and Anna begin an affair. After a short time, she returns to Saratov, he to Moscow, believing it’s good-by forever. All winter he is miserable, enervated, distracted by tristesse. In desperation, he contrives to go to Saratov, surprising her at a concert. Fearing discovery in her home town, she promises to come to Moscow. Will they cast aside reputation to live together, or will theirs be an affair of infrequent encounters in hotel rooms?

The Night at 14th Parallel

Красный дипломат

Soviet spy Ladeynikov learns that in one of the pharmaceutical centers in a small resort town works a former German war criminal Dr. Hass, who is finishing the creation of a deadly chemical gas RH development of which he began during WW2 experimenting on war prisoners. Since Ladeynikov doesn't know Dr. Hass's appearance, Soviet intelligence recruits an actor, Ivan Savushkin, who during the war escaped from a prison camp where Hass was testing his gas. Together they must identify and stop him before he finishes and unleashes his weapon of mass destruction.

In "Dead Souls" Gogol posed the most pressing and painful questions of modern life. The very title of the poem had enormous revealing power; it carried, according to Herzen, “something terrifying”, “he could not name it otherwise; not the revisionists - dead souls, but all these Nozdryovs. Manilovs and all those like them are dead souls, and we meet them at every step..."

Вашингтонский корреспондент