Svetlana Kryuchkova Movies

In this erotic, melodramatic thriller set in rundown apartment block in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), Russia during the 1920's, a woman prowls the alleys to exact her revenge. It is based on a novel by Yevgyeni Zamyatin. Sofia lives in an apartment with her hard-working husband Trofim. She is a good wife. Together they share a vigorous sex-life only marred by her failure to conceive. The insecure woman, to keep her husband from straying, adopts a Ganka, a 13-year old orphan. The dark-eyed girl is beautiful and it soon becomes obvious that Trofim is attracted to her. Time passes and sure enough, he ends up sleeping with her too. This does not set will with Sofia. She begins to plot Ganka's demise after the girl fails to die during a flood. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Ivan (Fedor Dunaevsky) is a teenager who is suffering through the acrimonious divorce of his parents. His sympathies are all with his father, who has taken up with a younger woman, and he has nothing but scorn for his mother, who won custody of him. He tries to set his mother's apartment on fire, but fortunately enough, he fails. He also fails at getting accepted into the university in a subject chosen by his mother. Ivan is not a deep thinker and basically only wants an easy existence with enough money to enjoy some of the good things of life. Since he has graduated from high school, he has to do something, so his mother sets him up with a job as a messenger. While on his first assignment (which he messes up), he makes friends with professor's daughter Katya (Anastasiya Nemolyayeva, the daughter of the film's cinematographer Nikolai Nemolyaev), a member of Moscow's social elite. He sets his heart on winning her, even though he is a homely and uneducated housing-project bumpkin with nothing to recommend him except his persistence, engagingly bad manners and a certain originality. Despite being thrown out of the girl's apartment many times by her father (Oleg Basilashvili), he keeps coming back and eventually wins the older man's grudging respect. Kuryer first became popular as a story published in the mid-1980s. The story was humorous and addressed the real-life situations and problems that young people would face, as opposed to ideologically heavy, Party-sponsored books that dominated the market at that time. That's what made Kuryer so appealing and fresh. As it often happens, when Karen Shakhnazarov adapted his own story for the screen, some of the magic was lost in the transition. However, the film was a popular success and also received a Special Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1987, along with the Jury Prize at the Tbilisi Film Festival, a State Prize of the Russian Federation, and, finally, was voted the "Best Film of the Year" by the readers of the film magazine Sovetsky Ekran. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide

This story concerns Captain Blinov (Viktor Proskurin), who is a border patrolman on leave visiting his mother. As a dutiful son, he delivers some books to Elena (Vera Glagoleva), a divorcee with a mind of her own. The Captain soon finds himself helping her solve a problem with a difficult neighbor by posing as her lover. It does not take long for this pose to become reality, as he soon falls in love with the independent Elena. However, he is too polite to make any advances and contents himself with accompanying her around town on her job. Nevertheless, his reticence may prove disastrous when he discovers that there is another man in Elena's life, and he leaves for his frontier post in a huff. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide