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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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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 […]