Nikolai Pastukhov Movies

A mute American working on a low-budget movie runs afoul of the Russian mafia in this internationally produced thriller. Billy (Marina Zudina), a special-effects makeup artist who is unable to speak, is in Moscow working on a cheapie slasher flick directed by Andy (Evan Richards), her sister's boyfriend. Late one night, Billy returns to the set to pick up some equipment and stumbles on what appears to be the filming of an actual snuff film. Watching, unseen, as an "actress" (Olga Tolstetskaya) is bludgeoned to death before her very eyes, Billy flees the set, pursued by the snuff film's crew. Eventually, she escapes and tells her story to her sister, Karen (Fay Ripley), and Andy. The film crew convinces the police that it was simply some special effects that Billy witnessed, then they start a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the hapless Americans. The intrigue soon leads Billy and her friends to "The Reaper" (Alec Guinness), the shadowy financier of an entire snuff-film underground. Director Anthony Waller's screenplay for Mute Witness began as a tale of gangsters in 1930s Chicago, but he rewrote it to take advantage of Russia's analogous present-day climate -- and the country's cheap sets and labor. Unexpected problems, from a diptheria epidemic to unexpected fines at the customs gate, nearly sank the production. The director convinced Guinness to appear in the film several years before principal photography began; the veteran thespian was paid nothing for his scenes, which were shot in a single morning in Germany. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Geopolitics and big oil play into the capture of a British geologist (Anthony Andrews) by the Russian military in Iran at the end of 1945. As soon as they capture him, they ship him off to a Siberian prison camp. The majority of the rest of the film is about his attempts to survive, and the relationships and adventures he has while imprisoned. Despite the presence of an English star, the rest of the major performers in this film are Russian, and it was one of the first films made on Russian soil to clearly depict life in the infamous gulags (prison labor camps) of Siberia. The geologist has numerous significant relationships, but the most dramatically compelling are with a female camp doctor and a young girl prisoner. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

"Barley" Scott Blair (Sean Connery) is an alcoholic book editor from a bargain-basement publishing house in Great Britain who'd rather be drinking in Lisbon than attending a book dealers' show in Russia. So he's surprised when a CIA agent (Mac McDonald) pulls him from his boozy holiday. It seems that the CIA has through a book show intermediary received a package from a Russian book editor named Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer) containing amazingly detailed notebooks written by a cynical Russian physicist named "Dante" (Klaus-Maria Brandauer). The notebooks show that Russia's nuclear threat is a joke: Russian rockets "suck instead of blow...and can't hit Nevada on a clear day," in the acerbic words of CIA Agent Russell Sheridan (Roy Scheider). But why is Dante sending the notebooks to Blair? How shall the Western world respond to what could be the end of the nuclear arms race? Blair gets drafted by a British Secret Service agent (James Fox) to go to the new Russia to meet Katya. He must see whether the new Russia is still immersed in the old Cold War and whether the notebooks are genuine or another deadly chapter in the war of the spies. ~ Nick Sambides, Jr., All Movie Guide

Based on a novel by Nikolai Leskov (which also inspired Andrzej Wajda's 1964 feature A Siberian Lady Macbeth and a modernistic opera), the story concerns Katerina (Natalia Andreichenko), the disgruntled wife of a boorish merchant (Nikolai Pastukhov). When she falls in love with Sergei (Alexander Abdulov), Katerina inveigles the handsome youth into helping her murder her husband. Irony piles upon irony in the sturm-und-drang closing scenes. The title Lady Makbet Mitsenskovo Uezda literally translates to Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Made during perestroika and the days of Gorbachev, this film is highly critical of Joseph Stalin and of religious persecution. Set in 1947, this story follows the efforts of Vika (Angelika Nevolina), a girl whose father has been arrested for political reasons. Rather than being allowed to complete school, she becomes the school janitor, thanks to the intervention of her "politically reliable" former principal. She marries an old teacher of hers, though she never lives with him. She is determined to have a baby of her own. To that end, she lures a young marine and would-be diplomat to her basement apartment. She is on the verge of believing in the possibility of love when her soldier-lover Senia (Gleb Soshikov) marries the girl who denounced her. Despite Senia's betrayal of Vika, probably in order to advance his career, he is unlikely to rise far because of his father's participation in the Baptist church. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide