Vladimir Menshov Movies

"Factory subjects" was a Soviet film genre. Sobstvennoye Mneniye is a typical movie in that genre. In it, a man and a woman who are production experts come to an electronics factory to help make it more efficient. The factory's own party official recognizes that there are inefficiencies but feels that it is more humane to leave things as they are. He is overruled by one of the visiting experts. In the meanwhile, the female expert realizes that her love for her male co-worker is in vain, for he has fallen in love with a girl in the electronics factory. After some conflict, these issues are resolved in a way that satisfies the majority of those concerned. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In this melodrama, Masha (Natalia Anreischenko) is a research lab worker who throws her husband out of the house when she discovers he has a mistress. Her friends encourage her to attend parties in order to be sociable and to perhaps meet a new man. She goes home with a taxi driver, but she leaves suddenly when his wife returns unexpectedly. There are comic touches to this feature, but viewers should be warned of a brutal gang-rape scene. After her adventures, Masha considers reconciling with her wayward husband when he vows to give up his mistress. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Ivan (Fedor Dunaevsky) is a teenager who is suffering through the acrimonious divorce of his parents. His sympathies are all with his father, who has taken up with a younger woman, and he has nothing but scorn for his mother, who won custody of him. He tries to set his mother's apartment on fire, but fortunately enough, he fails. He also fails at getting accepted into the university in a subject chosen by his mother. Ivan is not a deep thinker and basically only wants an easy existence with enough money to enjoy some of the good things of life. Since he has graduated from high school, he has to do something, so his mother sets him up with a job as a messenger. While on his first assignment (which he messes up), he makes friends with professor's daughter Katya (Anastasiya Nemolyayeva, the daughter of the film's cinematographer Nikolai Nemolyaev), a member of Moscow's social elite. He sets his heart on winning her, even though he is a homely and uneducated housing-project bumpkin with nothing to recommend him except his persistence, engagingly bad manners and a certain originality. Despite being thrown out of the girl's apartment many times by her father (Oleg Basilashvili), he keeps coming back and eventually wins the older man's grudging respect. Kuryer first became popular as a story published in the mid-1980s. The story was humorous and addressed the real-life situations and problems that young people would face, as opposed to ideologically heavy, Party-sponsored books that dominated the market at that time. That's what made Kuryer so appealing and fresh. As it often happens, when Karen Shakhnazarov adapted his own story for the screen, some of the magic was lost in the transition. However, the film was a popular success and also received a Special Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1987, along with the Jury Prize at the Tbilisi Film Festival, a State Prize of the Russian Federation, and, finally, was voted the "Best Film of the Year" by the readers of the film magazine Sovetsky Ekran. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide

In this drama Svetlana Zasypina plays a sixteen year old girl who has been a star in the Russian national gymnastics program since she was barely six years old. Now that injuries have prevented her from competing again, she is relegated to the tender mercies of the ordinary school system, where she's nobody special. She has a tremendous ego problem, and despite her small size, attempts to bully and lead her classmates, and is very difficult with her teachers. Elena is one of this obstreperous girl's teachers, and she is more than willing to try and outwit her and help her learn to be a human among humans. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide