Irina Pechernikova Movies

This film is of interest primarily because it contains within it the entire surviving footage of an unfinished 1974 film by the same director, Slave of Love, which was successfully remade shortly thereafter by another director, Nikita Mikhalkov.The "cover" story is about a woman (Jeanne Moreau) newly released from prison camps in the 1940s back into Russian society, who finds that there is no place for her in the world she has come back to. However, this painterly film is so filled with striking and surreal imagery that it would be misleading to say that the story is of any great importance in relation to that. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In this disaster movie about an overnight express train out of Moscow, a fire starts in one passenger car and quickly spreads, threatening the safety of the travelers. During the first and less successful half of the film, the lives of the passengers in one car are tentatively sketched - an airline flight attendant and a soldier strike up a mutual attraction, a black market operative guards his suitcase full of illegal money, a female conductor presses a relationship with a man she let onto the train for free, and other passengers relate their own hardships or indirectly reveal serious character flaws. During the second and more effective half of the film, disaster strikes, the fire starts, and with the flames coming very close to the actors, it was probably not a long stretch to feign terror or pain. The action scenes are well-executed and compensate for the surface treatment of the characters in the film. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

This "official" Soviet film reverses the attitudes of Andrei Startsov, the hero in the novel of Konstantin Fedin. In the book, Startsov was skeptical of the benefits of the oncoming Russian Revolution and of Bolshevism. In this version, he is attracted to the left, and becomes an active participant in the Bolshevik revolution and assumes a position of leadership in the Red Army. This reversal exacts a kind of revenge for the anti-Soviet attitudes of the novel and the 1920s filmed version of it. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi