Sobibor (Собибор) (2018)

When James Cameron injects high spectacle, grand romance, and completely made-up characters like Billy Zane's suave, tuxedoed, gun-toting villain Caledon Hockley into a painstakingly recreated Titanic, viewers can shrug off expectations of historical accuracy and give themselves up to blockbuster spectacle - never mind the roughly 1500 real people who died in 1912 - but the same can't be said of Sobibor, Russia's odd entry for Best Foreign Language film at the 2019 Academy Awards, a high-gloss but button-pushing movie in which writer, director, and star Konstantin Khabensky presents the lead up to the uprising of the prisoners in the Jewish extermination camp, Sobibor - with a similar appetite for spectacle over accuracy, so atrocities play out in unflinching full where restraint might be more respectful, and Christopher Lambert's Karl Frenzel tips over into caricature - a mumbling, starey Dirk Dastardly whose abhorrent acts are here tied to a camp love triangle.

★★☆☆☆

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The Vourdalak (French: 'La Famille du Vourdalak') (2023)

This French fantasy — at times horrible but never really horror; more ghastly, like a Grimms' fairytale — is based on a 1839 Russian novella about an aristocrat, lost in a Serbian forest, who encounters a strange family, and it's this story rather than the movie that is interesting — the monstrous patriarch predates Bram Stoker's Dracula — but the ghastly monster-like character is a weird overacting claymation or puppet, which detracts from rather than enhances your engagement with the gothic goings-on. 

★★★☆☆

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Loveless (Нелюбовь) (2017)

'Loveless' doesn't even begin to describe the war zone that is the home of supervillains Boris and Zhenya's broken marriage, and the collateral damage in this conflict is their poor twelve-year-old son, Alyosha, whose silent scream behind a door as his parents fight over who gets lumped with him post-conflict is an image that will haunt you forever, or until your phone beeps and furry kitten pics take you to some more self-serving place.

★★★★★

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The Return (Возвращение, Vozvrashcheniye) (2003)

Two young brothers have their mother's word and a 12-year-old photo to assure them that the man who has turned up home is their father, and no sooner has he sat down at the kitchen table and plied them with wine, the threesome head off on a tense car trip to fish, camp, learn how to make bowls from birch, and presumably, they are to bond provided the boys can conform to their new taskmaster's authoritarian approach to parenting...or could this mystery man have other plans and might the group in fact end up killing each other (you won't ever really believe)...but who would know given the trio's frustrating inability to simply communicate and square with each other?

★★★☆☆

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Elena (Елена) (2011)

In this unhurried but captivating Russian melodrama with something biting to say about privilege, responsibility and enabling, second wife and carer, Elena, launches into action when her ailing husband announces his intention to leave a bulk of his estate to his wayward daughter, not to Elena and so not to Elena's son's desperate family.

★★★★☆

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Leviathan (Левиафан) (2014)

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan is a sprawling drama about a mechanic, his second wife, his son and his lawyer, about life and corruption and church and state, God, pigs eating slop, whales, tragedy, and a leviathanic study of modern-day Russia delivered with the weight and breadth of a Dostoyevsky novel.

★★★★★

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How I Ended This Summer (Kak ya Provyol etom letim) (2010)

Fascinating immediately with its depiction of life for two men at a remote Russian Arctic island research station, this movie also succeeds as a pressure pot psychological drama when the younger of the two men, an intimidated student vacation worker, learns but does not pass on grave news regarding the other's family.

★★★★★

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