Vsevolod Sanayev Movies

This Russian romantic comedy drama with satirical overtones serves as an ideal vehicle for the effervescent talents of Tatiana Dogileva. She portrays a nurse with whom bureaucrat Leonid Filatov falls in love after having a heart problem. Director Eldar Ryazanov doesn't seem to know when best to end a scene, thus inflating a charming comic idea well past its worth at times. Fortunately, the focus throughout is on Ms. Dogileva, who can make even the dullest scene come vibrantly to life. A Forgotten Tune for the Flute was one of the earliest movie arrivals in the US after the fall of Communism; more of the same, please! ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This story starts in 1980 in Paris as the memories of Andrei Borodin (Igor Kostolevsky), a Soviet agent, take the action back to 1943 during the Teheran meetings of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. A high-ranking Nazi intelligence officer (Albert Filozov) developed a plan to assassinate the three world leaders in order to undermine the Allied forces. He commissioned a German agent Max Richard (Armen Dzhigarkhanyan) to carry out his plan, but it failed due to the quick action and thinking of Andrei. While in Teheran, Andrei met a Russian woman (Natalia Belokhvostikova) living in the city and they had a brief but intense affair. Nearly four decades later, the Nazi officer has been captured - but not for long. Freed by terrorists, the officer is hunting down the German agent who failed to carry out the planned assassinations. In the meantime, the Soviet agent is in Paris to meet his lover from years ago, and modern terrorists pose threats that seem to have been carried across the decades. Alain Delon briefly appears as the ill-fated police inspector who must hunt down the terrorists. Teheran '43 won a Gold Medal at the 1981 Moscow Film Festival. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In the Siberian springtime, old Yermolay is surprised to find his oldest son Stepan on his doorstep. Sentenced to prison for participating in a drunken brawl, he has just escaped, three months before his scheduled release date. Family from the countryside all around gather to celebrate his arrival, though by evening a policeman has arrived to take him back to serve out his old term, plus a little extra for his escape. Following this episode, moments in the lives of Yermolay's other sons are shown. Maxim has spent all the time he was not on the job (he is a construction worker) looking for a special medicine for his mother. He runs into a solid wall of resistance from the medical establishment. His younger brother Ignace, who is a popular professional wrestler, simply phones around to a few of his friends, and gets the medicine easily. Vasily, the youngest, shows himself to be far stronger and quicker than his somewhat boastful wrestling brother. These simple and lyrical celebrations of the simple life of country-folk are characteristic marks of director Vasily Shukshin's work; this film is based on some of the director's published short stories. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi