Acting
After the death of her father, a young woman travels to a remote convent on an island in the Black Sea to find out why her father funded it for years.
Blonde Lilia and brunette Violetta are fascinated by horse racing, and the young racers are more than a little attracted to them, too. However, the worlds of sporting and romance don't always coexist peacefully as the two girls learn the hard way through a series of touching, surreal, and sometimes heartbreaking encounters. One of the most beautifully photographed Russian films in recent years, this acclaimed modern classic was hailed at numerous film festivals including the Berlin Film Festival and Russia's Kinotavr Festival, where it won the Jury and Critics Prizes. Amazon
In the old days it was called hypochrondria, or black melancholia. Now, apparently, it's termed the Asthenic Syndrome. Whatever it is, Nikolai, a teacher of epicly indifferent pupils, has got it, and it's not much fun.
After Mick Nich, a 1930's Chicago gangster, sells out his own gang to the police, the Mafia hires the best hitman in town, Johnny Pollack, to follow him to Odessa, USSR. Upon arrival, Pollack loses his memory and goes on various adventures with a group of thick-headed Odessa locals who think he is a harmless butterfly collector.
A new doctor from Moscow arrives at a provincial mental institution. His interest is the peculiarities of the psyche of a patient who believes that he is Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated the last Russian tsar. In the course of their conversations it transpires that the patient is a kind of philosopher, not without a gift for suggestion. In a while the doctor himself falls under his patient’s influence: he tends to relive that fatal night of June 16-17, 1918 when, without any investigation or trial, Tsar Nicholas II, who had recently abdicated, was murdered, together with his wife, daughters and incurably ill heir. Soon the doctor realizes that the tragedy of the last Russian tsar is in part his own tragedy, too...
Makartsev, who is serving a sentence for theft, suddenly confesses to a murder he once committed. The case is entrusted to investigator Sukhareva, who in the course of the investigation becomes convinced that many of the possible participants in the murder have put an end to their criminal past. However, some of them deny their involvement in the murder, which, as it turns out, and was not. The victim of the crime, whom everyone thought was murdered, is alive. The court must find out the degree of guilt of people who have long repented for the crime they committed.
