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Rita Gladunko Movies

1991  
 
In this first American film to be shot entirely in Moscow, young vacationing American Archer Sloan (Frank Whaley) gets involved in the theft of a rare religious icon. The "hot-potatoed" icon lands in Sloan's possession and one of the underworld bad guys involved in the theft is murdered. Sloan becomes a suspect and is forced into fleeing the Moscow police while trying to locate the people who can vindicate him. This Glasnost-era film will probably be better remembered for its glimpse into a molting Soviet Union, than for intrigue as an actioner. Included in the cast is Polish producer Roman Polanski. ~ Rovi

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Starring:
Frank WhaleyNatalya Negoda, (more)
 
1991  
 
Andrei is buff, he is muscular, he is ready to bash heads whenever and wherever his much-worshipped mother directs, and his gang is similarly buff, similarly ready to follow the lead of Andre's mother. He has lived a life of competition and conflict with true Russian heroes like his father, who he believed died in Afghanistan, and enemies like Jews and foreigners. For him, after his lounge-singing mother, the muscular movie-star Arnold Schwarzenegger is a god. His mother is a piece of work, using her incestuous relationship with her son to motivate him to go off on rampages to satisfy her bile against all "non-Russians." One day she gets drunk and reveals that Andrei's father is not the soldier he always thought he was, but a Jewish composer and conductor. Thinking she has fashioned her son into the perfect instrument for revenge, she tells him how his father seduced her (making her pregnant) and then did not cast her as a singer for an important role, which blighted her career after that. When Andrei looks up his newly revealed father, he finds an impoverished, gentle man who lives in such chaos that a few new holes in the wall, put there in an anti-Semitic rage by the boy, have no effect on him. Instead, he is proud of his newfound son. Before long, the charms of gentleness and civility have won him over, and he realizes that he must protect his father against his mother and his former gang, still loyal to her wishes. In a film-making note, industry insiders said that many of the skinheads in the gangs in this movie were the genuine article, which lent a specially chilling realism to their anti-everybody performances. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

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Starring:
Oleg BorisovAndrei Gutin, (more)
 
1984  
 
The perennial clash between sophisticated yet stressed-out city life versus the often overly romanticized pull of the countryside is the theme in this lightly sketched story of an art expert, the art he loves, and the call of the paint brush. When a modern art historian (Rodion Nakhepetov) arrives in a village on a quest for primitive art for an exhibition he is mounting in Paris, he becomes good friends with Seraphim Polubes (Eduard Bocharov), a local artist who paints murals on his humble abode. Soon the world-weary art expert is finding an extremely enjoyable and distracting companionship among the villagers and Polubes' group of friends, individual characters all. Their company is bringing back memories of the time he wanted to paint rather than critique painting, and that newly awakened desire is melded with another kind of desire awakened by an attractive young blond woman barely half his age. Thus stimulated, his interest in going back to life in Moscow is understandably dampened -- but not his budding romance. As he gets ready to take that train back to the life he once knew, he is faced with a moment of truth and a decision that could permanently change his career. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

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Starring:
Rodion NakhapetovEduard Bocharov, (more)
 
1969  
 
After receiving an award, Russian poet Olga Bergholtz (Alla Demidora) recalls the struggle of the siege of Leningrad. She flashes back to her idyllic childhood, heartened by the new changes in government after the Russian Revolution. Olga inspires the people of Leningrad with words of encouragement on radio broadcasts during the terrible ordeal of the Nazi invasion. She recalls the inexorable ties between the human spirit, the religion and the history of a country plagued throughout antiquity by invasions. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

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Starring:
Alla DemidovaAndrei Popov, (more)