Orlando 1992
England, 1600. Queen Elizabeth I promises Orlando, a young nobleman obsessed with poetry, that she will grant him land and fortune if he agrees to satisfy a very particular request.
England, 1600. Queen Elizabeth I promises Orlando, a young nobleman obsessed with poetry, that she will grant him land and fortune if he agrees to satisfy a very particular request.
A group of scientists is sent to the planet Arkanar to help the local civilization, which is in the Medieval phase of its own history, to find the right path to progress. Their task is a difficult one: they cannot interfere violently and in no case can they kill. The scientist Rumata tries to save the local intellectuals from their punishment and cannot avoid taking a position.
Set in 2002, an abandoned 5-year-old boy living in a rundown orphanage in a small Russian village is adopted by an Italian family.
A Finn preparing a work on the Russian hunting traditions and customs, comes to Russia to collect materials and is invited to take part in a hunting party. His flamboyant companions include an Army general, with more than a passing resemblance to Aleksander Lebed, a police detective, local forest ranger (a devotee of Zen Buddhism) and some big-city types from St. Petersburg. Inevitably, their good intentions soon give way to endless drinking, visits to local farm girls and much else besides.
A man goes for a walk through the countryside with his dying mother.
In 1942 Bavaria, Eva is alone, when Adolf arrives with Josef, his wife Magda, and Martin to spend a couple of days without politics.
Harry Palmer heads a private investigation business based in Moscow. His associates are Nikolai "Nick" Petrov, ex-CIA agent Craig, and ex-KGB Colonel Gradsky. They take on the job of finding 1000 grams of weapons-grade plutonium stolen from the Russian government, though they do not know the identity of their client.
Military doctor General Klenski is arrested in Stalin's Russia in 1953 during an anti-Semitic political campaign accused of being a participant in so-called "doctors' plot".
The teacher's daughter dreams of giving her mother an unusual gift for the New Year and making her happy. At a custom gift agency, she chooses the most expensive one - dinner with a star. But it was difficult to guess what kind of fee we were talking about, and now she and her friends have several months to earn this money. Musician friends help her with this. By coincidence, the star is my mother's unrequited high school love, and New Year's dinner with the star will take place against all odds.
A teenage soldier in World War I—a simple village boy with a naive youthful dream of fame and medals—throws himself into the unknown and goes blind in the first battle, thus taking on a new job: intercepting enemy planes by listening to the air through huge metal funnels.
Dovlatov charts six days in the life of a brilliant, ironic writer who saw far beyond the rigid limits of 70s Soviet Russia. Sergei Dovlatov fought to preserve his own talent and decency with poet and writer Joseph Brodsky, while watching his artist friends got crushed by the iron-willed state machinery.
In 1961, a Soviet medical officer is conflicted about his position overseeing the health of future cosmonauts.
World War II is raging on the Eastern front but the soldier Nikanor has been sent to Siberia: bot as a prisoner, but as the leader of a motley group of entertainers who travel from village to village giving concerts. Still, Big Brother is watching and when the entertainers encounter a strange man in the woods there is trouble brewing. One of the performers falls in love with the mysterious backwoodsman, but the secret service is after him, too.
Sumptuous filming of the journey of a shipwrecked Japanese expedition from the Pacific Ocean across Siberia to the court of Catherine the Great of Russia. A Russo-Japanese co-production of a unique event in history which was the hit of Cannes and other film festivals but did not receive wide distribution despite its huge scope, high production values, and very human story of culture clash.
A surreal journey of a displaced spirit as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question - "What is happiness?" - an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness.
This charming comedy tracks the lives of several romantic pairs through trials and tribulations. The main focus of the story is a young soldier with a good heart but little ambition and his fiancée, who feels torn when a charming and sophisticated intellectual enters her life and sweeps her off her feet. There are also several side stories, also all dealing with relationships, most significantly the soldier's mother, whose comfortable but unexceptional marriage is threatened when a past love returns to her life.
Via the New York Times: "...a severely obscure meditation on pre-revolutionary Russia in the form of an encounter between a ghost from the past and the ghost's present-day guardian. In fact, the two characters seem to be the shade of Anton Chekhov and the young man who tends a Chekhov museum in the Crimea, though that is never made explicit."
An old Russian grandmother or "babushka", who took part in the Battle of Stalingrad, sacrificed everything for her children and even sold her house to get money for her grandchildren, is shuttled among those very grandchildren--products of the "new" Russia--none of whom want her to stay with them since she's too much of a "burden" for them.
Jessica, an American ballerina, reluctantly enrolls in a Russian dance academy, where she meets the charismatic choreographer Anthony. A dead ringer for his long dead lover, Jessica becomes his favorite student -- and his personal obsession.
A biologist, obsessed with the idea of writing a treatise on a new kind of mouse, becomes witness to a number of bizarre and horrific events, from his son's suicide, to the S&M engaged in by respectable middle-aged men, to his own family's psychic morbidity.