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The Monster Is Loose: Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan as a Parable of Putin’s Russia?
Russian cinema has always commanded international respect, even when things were frosty between the Soviet Union and the ‘West.’ The same still holds true for the modern arthouse movies from the country. Since the early 2000s, Andrei Zvyagintsev has become one of the more distinguished Russian directors. Particularly because of the recent crisis between his […]
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Future Management: Funny and Romantic Disaster Control in The New Year Calling Plan
New Year’s is an entirely different beast in Russia than in most other countries. For historical reasons, it’s basically Christmas and the rest of the holiday season rolled into one. The turn of the year is what Russians celebrate big time, and it’s also when they receive their gifts. That is why every December romantic, […]
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Danger Zone: Science-Fiction and Metaphysics in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
Apart from legendary Battleship Potemkin genius Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky is arguably Russia’s most renowned movie director from the Soviet era. The son of famous poet Arseni Tarkovsky polarizes, however. Opinions on him are divided. Some can’t really get into his films and only consider them to be dead boring. Others regard these works as […]
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Children of the Revolution: Slapstick, Soviet-style in Leonid Gaidai’s Operation ‘Y’ & Shurik’s Other Adventures
Operation ‘Y’ And Shurik’s Other Adventures (1965) is one of the cult comedies from that time virtually every Russian knows. Other than having a fun time, what can we can learn about life in the Soviet Union of the 1960s from watching the film? Meet Shurik (Alexander Demyanenko), the nerdy, clumsy, good-natured, and oh so […]
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Touch-Type: Valeri Todorovsky’s Katya Ismailova and the Post-Soviet Years
Remember the days when there were no word processors and computers? ‘It was twenty years ago today,’ maybe a bit longer, when everybody used to write with a pen and some people did nothing else but interpret another person’s handwriting. Such a job was called ‘typist,’ and the French-Russian 1994 production Katya Ismailova by Hipsters […]
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Rebels with a Cause: Valeri Todorovsky’s Russian Hipsters and the Postwar Jazz
Russians tend to love music. People who are familiar with the country’s cinema know that there are usually a couple of songs in the films produced in Russia, especially in those from the Soviet period. Actors often double as singers and vice versa. It is therefore surprising that the musical had been neglected by the […]
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The World Needs a Hero: Vadim Sokolovsky’s The Book Of Masters as a Modern Russian Fairy Tale
The Walt Disney Company has been really active in Russia in recent years. Last year, it bought 49% of the shares of 7TV and launched its own television channel in the country. Yet Disney’s attempts to enter the Russian market did not begin with that event. With The Book Of Masters, the company had already […]
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The Odd Couple: Dysfunctional Russian Lives in Boris Khlebnikov’s Help Gone Mad
What would happen if you transferred Miguel de Cervantes’s peculiar twosome of Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa or Samuel Beckett’s equally eccentric pairing of Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot to the Moscow of the 21st century? This is exactly the experiment Help Gone Mad, an interesting Russian independent film by Boris Khlebnikov, seems […]
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A Life Less Ordinary: Roman Karimov’s Inadequate People and the ‘Russian Realities’
There are those who complain that Russian cinema has abandoned its distinctive identity in favor of Hollywood conventions in recent years, and justifiably so. Ever since Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch, a surprise success in the United States and elsewhere in 2004, there has been a perplexing, sometimes even disturbing trend to move away from the […]
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Family Affair: Elena as a Thought-Provoking Character Study and Portrait of Life in Contemporary Russia
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Leo Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of his famous novel Anna Karenina. This was true for the aristocratic clans in the tsardom of the 19th century and it is still valid for many societies, especially contemporary Russia with its glaring social […]
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Bridges to Babylen: Generation P as a Cyberpunk Satire of Russian Consumerism in the 1990s
“We’re waiting for changes,” Victor Tsoy, arguably the biggest rock star of the Soviet Union, exclaimed in the late 1980s. They would come only a few years later. The 1990s were a decade of transformations on both sides of the formerly bipolar world order, and the cultural climate was largely represented by their teens and […]