Alexandr Yakovlev Movies
Actor/filmmaker Robert Capelli Jr., responsible for the 1999 bikini-infested film The Rules (For Men), teams up with film editor Jeffery Wolf to direct the so-called comedy Mail Order Bride. Danny Aiello stars in this film which tries to find humor in a story about the Russian and Italian Mafia involved in the business of human smuggling. Also starring Frank Gorshin (from the original Batman) and Vincent Pastore (from The Sopranos). Mail Order Bride premiered at the 2003 American Film Market. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert Capelli Jr., Ivana Milicevic, (more)
- 1999
Love blooms amidst the backdrop of czarist Russia in Nikita Mikhalkov's The Barber of Siberia. The story opens in 1905 Springfield, MA, when a woman writes a letter to a young man in a military summer-training camp. He is currently being punished by one of his superiors, who forces him to wear a gas mask until he acknowledges that Mozart was a worthless composer. The woman has an important story to tell her addressee, and our story flashes back 20 years to Russia, where American Jane Callahan (Julia Ormond) is traveling to Moscow. A man who may or may not be Jane's father, Douglas McCracken (Richard Harris), is trying to perfect a machine, christened "The Barber of Siberia," that will harvest trees from the vast Siberian forests. Douglas hopes Jane can charm Gen. Radlov (Alexei Petrenko), the head of a Russian military academy, into arranging the financing that will enable him to complete his work on the harvester. En route, Jane meets a friendly Russian soldier, Andrei Tolstoy (Oleg Menshikov), and the two soon fall in love. Jane then meets and flirts with Radlov, who grows reciprocally fond of her -- enough so that he asks her to marry him. When it becomes evident she'd rather be with Tolstoy, he finds himself shipped off to Siberia after allegedly attacking a grand duke. Merging romance, costume drama, and slapstick comedy, The Barber of Siberia was screened at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Oleg Menshikov, Julia Ormond, (more)
Nikita Mikhalkov examines the plight of the filmmaker operating in an uncertain political climate in his irony-laden seriocomedy Slave of Love. The time is 1918, at the height of the Bolshevik revolution. A small group of filmmakers are hurriedly trying to complete a silent melodrama while the world changes all around them. As production progresses, leading lady Elena Solovei metamorphoses from self-centered movie star to committed revolutionary. Normally described as "Chekhovian," director Mikhalkov borrows a few pages from Pirandello. With Slave of Love he gained his first serious international attention. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Yelena Solovey, Alexander Kalyagin, (more)
