VTLIB (Video 6378)

Taxi Blues aka Taksi-Blyuz (1990)

Ivan is old Russia: thick, dour, hard-working, often brutish; he misses Communism. He drives a taxi and one night meets Alexi, a new Russian, a musician, an alcoholic, irresponsible. Alexi stiffs Ivan for the fare, so Ivan tracks him down and a love-hate relationship ensues. When Alexi lets the bath water run over in Ivan's flat and Ivan must pay 500 rubles for repairs, he tries to force Alexi into day labor to repay him. It's hopeless. Then, suddenly, Alexi is discovered, goes on a jazz tour of America, becomes a celebrity, and returns in triumph. Ivan longs to renew the friendship, and it looks as if he may get what he wants.
Controversial, laced-in-acid tragicomedy chronicling the relationship between a brutish, narrow-minded Moscow
cabdriver and an alcoholic Jewish musician: characters who become symbols of the Old and New Russia. The former is
desperately out of sync with the changing times; the latter, who embodies the spirit of the oppressed Soviet artist-intellectual,
plays his saxophone solos to block out the reality of his existence. Lounguine deservedly earned the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival for this important and provocative film.

VTLIB (Video 5628)

Window to Paris aka Okno v Parizh (1994)

Nikolai (played by Sergei Dontsov) has been fired from his job as a music teacher and has to live in the gym until he finds a
place to stay. Finally, he gets a communal room in the apartment of Gorokhov (Victor Mikhalkov). The room's
 previous inhabitant, an old lady, has died a year ago, and yet her cat, Maxi, is still in the locked room, healthy and fat. Soon,   Nikolai and his neighbours discover the mystery: there is a window to Paris in the room. That's when the comedy begins - will the Russians be able to cope with the temptation to profit from the discovery?

Enemy at the Gates (2001)

During the WWII battle of Stalingrad, two snipers, a Russian (Law), and a German (Harris), are locked in a battle of wills and marksmenship, while the Russian is boosted to the status of hero by a  political official (Fiennes).   In World War II, the fall of Stalingrad will mean the collapse of the whole country. The Germans and Russians are fighting over every block, leaving only ruins behind. The Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev stalks the Germans, taking them out one by one, thus hurting the morale of the German troops. The political officer Danilov leads him on, publishing his efforts to give his countrymen some hope. But Vassili eventually start to feel that he can not live up to the expectations on him. He and Danilov fall in love with the same girl, Tanya, a female soldier. From Germany comes the master sniper König to  put an end to the extraordinary skilled Russian sniper.
 

Battle for the Soul of Russia

Reporter Bill Turpie documents "the murderous history of the religious persecution by the KGB, the clergy's active role in opposing the abortive coup attempt, and the new role of the churches in public education in Russia."

VTLIB (Video 2518)

Ivanovo detstvo (1962)

12-year old Ivan works as a spy at the eastern front. The small Ivan can cross the German lines unnoticed to collect information. Three Soviet officers try to take care of this boy-child.  Taut, poignant account of 12-year-old Burlaiev, whose family  is slaughtered during WW2, and his plight as he's sent as a spy into Nazi territory. Tarkovsky's first feature. Retitled: THE YOUNGEST SPY.
 

VTLIB (Video 2578)

Little Vera

Groundbreaking, post-glasnost look at life in modern Russia. Negoda offers a fresh performance as an alienated,         working-class, rock music-loving young woman; the depiction of her sexual relationship with Sokolov, plus the manner in  which Western culture has affected her life, make this unlike any other Soviet film you've ever seen. Not surprisingly, it was  a smash hit in its homeland.
 

Magnitogorsk : forging the new man

A documentary about the fortunes of three generations living in the shadow of Russia's most breath-taking industrial project of the thirties. The bare steps of the Urals were transformed at breakneck speed into a blast-furnace complex, and a city was raised out of the ground - Magnitogorsk. With fragments of Joris Iven's 1932 film, Song of the Heroes, about the building up of the Soviet Union, he used Magnitogorsk to show how the new world and the new man were being forged.
 

VTLIB(Video 6375)

Russian Roulette: A Frontline Special

Frontline investigates the security of the Russian nuclear arsenal, interviewing U.S. and Russian military commanders and scientists about the menacing potential for catastrophe in the former Soviet Union.
 

VTLIB (Video 5982), VU-FOR

Prisoner of the Mountains aka Kavkazskij plennik (1996)
 

Summary: A pair of Russian soldiers are captured and taken prisoner by a Chechen father hoping to barter them for the release of his captured son. A bond of understanding develops between the soldiers and their captors, but it is broken when plans for their release go awry, and a chain of violence and retaliation is preciptitated.
 
 

VTLIB (Video 5240), VU-FOR

Burnt By the Sun

Nikita Mikhalov directs and stars as Colonel Sergei Kotov, hero of the Revolution who is spending the summer in the country with his young daughter (Mikhalov's real-life daughter), his wife and her eccentric family. But when his wife's childhood love suddenly appears, the idyllic summer day takes a surprising turn. A lyrical film filled with beauty and warmth, BURNT BY THE SUN is also an indelible account of a man dedicated to family and fatherland, cruelly destroyed by political paranoia.
 
 

Stalin (1992) (TV)
 

The rise of Joseph Stalin, Dictator of USSR. The story shows how he came to power in 1917, took control after Lenin death, and stayed there until his death in 1953. Stalin was responsible for more deaths to his own people than Hitler or any other dictator in world history.
 

VTLIB (Video #6518)

From Tzar to Stalin (1987)

Excerpts of historical films covering the period of the  reign of Czar Nicholas II to Josef Stalin.
 
 

VTLIB (Video #5086)

Russia's Last Tsar

Fabled Romanovs, led by Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, ruled imperial Russia in high splendor, despite the disintegration of their divided, war-torn country. In 1918 the rise of Communism violently collided with the rule of royalty when the tsar, his beloved wife, and their children were murdered and buried in a secret grave. Story is told from newly discovered photographs and archival film. A National Geographic special.

VTLIB, BB-FOR, VU-FOR

Andrei Rublyov (1969)

I only recommend this one for history or art majors who know who this guy is and have an interest.  It is a difficult movie to follow, even if you're a history major.

Brilliantly devised and directed account of the famous 15th-century icon painter, focusing on an age-old conflict: should an artist participate in the political and social upheavals of the time, or should he simply record history with his brush? This magnificent film is worthy of comparison with the best of Eisenstein's historical dramas. Scripted by Tarkovsky and Andrei Milchakov-Konchalovsky; shelved by the Soviet authorities, and unseen until 1971.
 
 

VTLIB (Video 6382)

A chef in love (1996) aka Mille et une recettes du cuisinier amoureux, Les (1996)

The story of Pascal Ichak, a larger-than-life French traveller, bon vivant, and chef, who falls in love with Georgia and a Georgian princess in the early 1920s. All is well until the arrival of the Red Army of the Caucasus, as the Soviet revolution that has swept Russian comes to Georgia. Told as a flashback from the present, as a French-Georgian man whose mother was Pascal's lover translates his memoirs for Pascal's niece. A sweeping romance about a free-spirited Frenchman whose romantic idyll with a princess in pre-Soviet Georgia is threatened by the barbarism of the Russian revolution.
 
 
 

BB-FOR

Dersu Uzala (1974)

A Russian army explorer who is rescued in Siberia by a rugged Asiatic hunter renews his friendship with the woodsman years later when he returns at the head of a larger expedition. The hunter finds that all his nature lore is of no help when he accompanies the explorer back to civilisation.
 
 

VTLIB(Video 6346) BB-FOR, VU-DOC

Stalingrad (1993)

A depiction of the brutal battle of Stalingrad, the Third Reich's 'high water mark', as seen through the eyes of German officer Hans von Witzland and his battalion.
 
 
 

VTLIB, BB-DRAMA

Doctor Zhivago (1965)
 

Sumptuous, sprawling epic from Boris Pasternak's acclaimed novel; Sharif is charismatic as Russian poet/doctor Zhivago, an orphan who later marries aristocratic Chaplin but falls in love with politicized nurse Christie. Film spans several decades, including WW1 and Bolshevik Revolution, and features stirring crowd scenes, gorgeous romantic vistas (set to Maurice Jarre's sweeping music) and a powerful exodus sequence on train.
 
 

BB-DRAMA

Gulag (1985) (TV)

Mickey Almon is a sports star turned reporter covering the athletics in Moscow. Framed by the KGB and forced to confess that he was spying for America, he is sentenced to detention in a Gulag, a barbaric prison camp in the wilds of Siberia. Unable to prove his innocence, Mickey must either put up with the inhuman conditions or engineer an escape.
 
 

VTLIB

The Three Sisters (1965)

Set in Russia, at the turn of the century, the play focuses on three educated, well-bred sisters whose romances and careers have turned out disastrously. They share a house in the country with their witless brother and his shrewish bride. Obsessed with the idea that all their problems are    caused by living in the provinces, they dream of returning to their childhood home in Moscow.
 
 
 

BB-FOR

Luna Park (1992)

Oleg is the head of a gang of antisemitic skinheads clinging to the old communist ideals in present-day Moscow. When he learns from his mother that his long lost father actually is a jewish bo- hemian rather than an Afghanistan war hero, he traces him down in order to kill him. But the intriguing father and his "reactionary" lifstyle soon fascinates Oleg which leads to a clash with his gang.  I'm not going to lie about it--its a strange one.
 

VU-DRAMA

Gorky Park

Absorbing murder mystery set in Russia, where police  investigator Hurt doggedly pursues the case of three bodies          buried in Gorky Park. Lots of twists and turns, vivid atmosphere (with Helsinki doubling for Moscow) ... marred             somewhat by unconvincing romance and protracted finale.  Dennis Potter adapted Martin Cruz Smith's novel.
 
 
 

VTLIB (Video 1500)

Anna Karenina

Practically passionless recounting of the oft-filmed tale of the title character (Marceau), a wife and mother who commences       an illicit affair with dashing Count Vronsky (Bean) in 19th-century Russia. Handsomely mounted, but dramatically flat. Notable only as the first Western-produced ANNA to be filmed in Russia--notably St. Petersburg.
 
 
 

VTLIB (Video 973)

Reds

Sprawling, ambitious film about American idealist/journalist John Reed's involvement with Communism, the Russian Revolution, and a willful, free-thinking woman named Louise Bryant. Provocative political saga is diffused, and overcome at times, by surprisingly conventional, often sappy approach to the love story (climaxed by Bryant's Little Eva-like journey to Russia over the ice floes). Interesting but wildly overpraised film won Oscars for Beatty as Best Director (he also produced and coscripted), Stapleton as Best Supporting Actress, Vittorio Storaro for Best Cinematography.