Valentina Telichkina Movies

Yuri Aliabiev (Yuri Vasilyev) is a newspaper reporter who has been working in the letter-to-the-editor department for three years. He jumps at the chance to travel to a small town in the Ural region to substantiate the letters from a vitriolic female letter-writer named Anikina (Nadezhda Fedosova). Yuri learns that Anikina is full of hot air. He meets Djura (Galina Polskikh), a pretty and opinionated country girl who is the object of Anikina's scorn, and Yuri falls in love with Djura, but she spurns his amorous advances. Later, he is assigned to Geneva and Paris, where he is befriended by the Yank writer Barton (Anatoli Krishanski). Barton educates Yuri in the finer points of capitalism before he is transferred back to Moscow. He goes back to the small town to find Djura and finds she has been ostracized by the community because of her association with him. French singer (Mireille Mathieu) and actress (Annie Girardot) make appearances in the scenes in Paris. This socially conscious drama was seen by over 27 million people in the Soviet Union alone. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

This distinguished Russian film stars Inna Churikova, who starred in all of her husband Gleb Panfilov's award-winning films. The fact that she is very ordinary looking lends added piquancy to her fine acting. In this comic romance, she is Pasha, a factory girl who acts in amateur plays in her spare time. In one such play she was seen by a film director who asks her to play the role of Joan of Arc in a film of his. In this story, we see how her private life fails to improve substantially even as her status changes from factory girl to movie star. Large portions of the movie-within-a-movie about Joan of Arc are shown as the story proceeds. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

The 19th-century Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's classic drama The Seagull continued a theatrical movement known as "realism," which focused on the everyday crises and foibles of more believably real people. In order to perform the roles of the new dramatic movement properly, the Actors Theater of Moscow refined a new style of acting, later synthesized under Konstantin Stanislavsky, and known in the U.S. as "method acting." Thus Chekhov's plays represent a theatrical peak to be scaled, and are challenging somewhat in the manner of Shakespeare's or Moliere's plays. This lavish Soviet Russian production attempts to scale that summit. The story concerns an actress, Arkadina (Alla Demidova) who is distressed by the complexity of her life, and of the lives of her friends and family. All the people around her are consumed by self-doubt and dark obsessions, which they discuss at length. Her lover, Tregorin (Yuri Yakovlev), is a self-important but renowned writer who is playing psychological tricks on a simple country girl who has a crush on him. Her son, a playwright, is fascinated by death and may be suicidal. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Grigori Chukrai is well-respected director, known in the West for his films Clear Skies and Ballad of a Soldier. Netipichnaya Istoriya, the original title, translates as "An Atypical Story," but the film was soon retitled Tryasina, which means "Quagmire." It shows how mother's blind love transforms her son into a deserter, bringing the boy to a kind of moral and social death. During World War Two, a widow is about to lose her only son to the military. Unable to bear that kind of loss, she engineers an accident just as she is taking him to the train station to begin his enlistment. Secretly, she takes her now helpless son back to her village home, and becomes an eccentric hermit in the eyes of the villagers, rarely venturing outside the house. At home, the boy becomes deeply dependent on her, even though they snipe and jab at one another in an incessant war for dominance. Years after the war has ended, his mother dies suddently of a heart attack. The boy has now become a pale, wizened bag of bones, and emerges from the house like some creature from the depths of the sea. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

This nostalgic comedy drama is set during the time of "communal apartments" in the 1950s, when very diverse people had to share pre-revolutionary apartments. Here, a woman who lives in such an apartment in Moscow has likeable neighbors who always come to her at the wrong moment to watch TV. She is an independent, emancipated woman. She meets an ambitious engineer from the provinces whom she likes, but things are not perfect between them and there are frequent breakups, which are not eased by having the neighbors almost literally in their laps most of the time. This very popular film is based on a play by Alexander Volodin. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi