Juozas Budraitis Movies

Enslaved, left for dead, and fated to become the most fearsome warrior in all the land, the last surviving member of a massacred tribe embarks on an epic quest to avenge his family's murder while getting drawn into a ferocious battle to defeat a monster and save a nation. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

This is a quirky love story about a political exile returning home after the fall of communism in Russia. He is a conductor. His ex-wife tells him that he has a daughter he didn't know about who has gone missing. In the intervening years, the girl in question has become an accomplished pianist and is now the ward and possible love child of an old friend of the conductor's, whom he is visiting. The conductor unknowingly chooses the girl to replace another pianist, who is unable to join him in his country-wide tour. Along the way, the girl and the conductor have an affair. When the girl's mother attends one of the conductor's concerts and sees her performing, she informs him that this is the girl that she believes to be his daughter. The two men then get together to discuss their rival claims to paternity (obviously the conductor hopes he loses in this race), and by getting good and drunk and taking a long walk down memory lane together, they are able to determine who the lucky man is. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In ancient Korea, a king trains his son as a warrior in order to overcome a strain of inordinate gentleness he sees in him. His intentions are shown to have succeeded when the boy, now king, banishes a poet friend of his for improperly criticizing him. In modern Korea, when a girl is killed for no reason by her teacher, her father vows to get revenge for that someday. The killer has vanished over the border into China, and the father has remarried and had a son, whom he trains to carry out his revenge. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Lena (Anna Yanovskaya), a habitual drug user, has been disowned and disinherited by her father, a high official in the government. Her boyfriend, Alexei (Igor Furmanyuk), is in some sense luckier: his father has bankrupted himself trying to pay for his son's drugs. Once the father's money runs out, the two druggies and their friends move into the poor man's apartment and attempt to extract the money they want by other methods. The father seeks the help of a neighboring woman in sorting out the situation, and with her help he discovers that they have resorted to a phony kidnapping to raise cash, which has tragic results. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In an unconvincing, politically slanted adventure nuanced with a slight sci-fi underpinning, a Soviet television journalist is hot on the trail of some strange mystery imbedded in a mountainous region of the U.S. The reporter picks up a trail guide and the two hike off into the high mountains in search of one particular site. They eventually find it -- a small village in which everyone seems sullen and withdrawn. In spite of their unusual attitudes, the villagers are also math whizzes, even the young kids. Searching a bit further, the journalist and the guide discover the explanation, but it will not be easy to get out of there and tell the rest of the world about it. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Facts is a dramatization of a massacre in a Lithuanian village during World War II when Nazis rounded up over 100 men, women, and children accused of partisan activity and then torched the houses in which they were held. Using Russian interrogations of a few survivors, the testimony of villagers, and some of the Germans responsible for the killing, the film gradually reconstructs the event and its context. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The Big Night Bathe sets people who are drifting without a direction, tending to indulge their whims, against people who might -- but will probably not -- fall into the same pattern. Jeanne (Malgozata Braunek) and her ex-husband Willy (Youazas Boudraitis) head a group of profligates during a summer's vacation on the Black Sea coast. Several in the group are bored as a way of life and are close to intolerable to each other. Among them is the spoiled son of an important government official. Opposite in temperament, age, and character, is a pair formed by Sava, a young history student (Nikolar Sotirov) and Ninelle (Yanina Kasheva), his somewhat innocent friend. Before the events that were to mark the "big night bathe" in the minds of the protagonists forever, Sava has to suddenly return home to be with his dying mother. He is exempt from the group's folly, but Ninelle is not. After spending the afternoon in back-biting, the disparate members in the group eat crayfish on the beach, and then go for a midnight swim. It is just after the swim that the men are goaded into playing a macabre and dangerous game in which they stick their head in a noose while standing on a rock. When someone knocks the rock out from under them, they must cut the noose before it has a chance to tighten and either snap their neck or strangle them to death. One of the men does not make it. By the time the police have finished with their investigation, the death was deemed "an accident." Ninelle cannot tolerate the memory of what she has seen and leaves for Sava's village in order to unburden her grief. The reaction of the protagonists to the unnecessary death, and Ninelle's personal decisions, bring the issue of a "meaningless life" to the forefront. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide