Mikhail Boyarsky Movies

This version of The Idiot, made for the Russian TV, is actually the first attempt to film the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel in its entirety. Yevgeny Mironov plays the title character, Russian Prince Myshkin, who returns to St. Petersburg after a stay in a Swiss mental hospital. The prince is not literally a mental midget; he is considered an idiot because, as an honest and upright person, he cannot keep pace with the evil in the world. He busies himself with the petty problems of his aristocratic friends, which drive him back into the recesses of insanity. Lidiya Velezheva co-stars as Nastassya Filippovna, the woman of loose morals who turns out to be the only person who truly cares about Myshkin's welfare, while Vladimir Mashkov plays the nominal villain of the piece, an iconoclastic merchant named Rogozhin, whose passion for Nastassya culminates in tragedy. The Idiot was previously filmed in France in 1946, in Japan by Akira Kurosawa in 1951, and in Russia in 1958. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In 1987, director Alla Surikova scored enormous success in her home country with Chelovek S Bulvara Kaputsinov, an engaging slapstick comedy about an idealistic film projectionist trying to introduce the Old West to the nascent art of motion pictures. This film, aptly named Choknutye / Crazy People, features another idealist, an Austrian engineer (Ulrich Pleitgen) who comes to 19th century Russia to build the first railroad. A group of aristocrats sees him as a direct threat to their thriving stagecoach business and they employ elaborate schemes to thwart his project. However, with the help of a dashing lieutenant (Nikolai Karachentsov), a double-dealing agent of the secret police (Leonid Yarmolnik), and a mysterious young woman named Maria (Olga Kabo), he manages to get the czar's approval. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide

A small town is turned upside down when Mr. Fest (Andrei Mironov) arrives with a movie projector in this hilarious Georgian comedy western. In an homage to silent-era slapstick comedy, hard-drinking cowboys give up booze for milk when the saloon loses patrons to the picture show. The town bully joins the church choir along with a slew of sultry saloon sirens when they are drawn away from the evils of alcohol and moral depravity. Barroom brawls, Indian attacks, sight gags, and an all-star cast made this the second most popular Soviet film of 1988. Over 40 million people in the USSR paid to see the feature, the last for the popular Andei Mironov. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide