Nikita Mikhalkov - 12 aka 12 razgnevannyh muzhchin (2007)

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A loose remake of 12 Angry Men (1957), set in a Russian school in the war-torn republic of Chechnya. 12 jurors are struggling to decide the fate of a Chechen teenager (Apti Magamaev) who allegedly killed his Russian stepfather. The jurors: a racist taxi-driver, a suspicious doctor, a vacillating TV producer, a Holocaust survivor, a flamboyant musician, a cemetery manager, and others represent the fragmented society of modern day Russia. Amidst the battle between Chechens and Russians outside, a stray bird (a touch of New Age cinema) is flying above the jurors heads, alluding to tolerance. Written by Steve Shelokhonov

Nikita Mikhalkov - Utomlyonnye solntsem AKA Burnt By The Sun (1994)

Review
By the early '90s, it was finally possible for filmmakers working in the former Soviet Union to deal honestly with the horrors of the 1930s, when Stalin and his regime "reassessed" the contributions of many heroes of the Revolution, resulting in mass imprisonments and death for many millions. Nikita Mikhalkov's brilliant film about those dark days is ironically set at a sunny summer retreat where Serguei Petrovich Kotov (Mikhalkov), an officer who has been honored for his contributions to the success of the state, and his family are enjoying an idyllic summer's day. The film's deliberate pacing for a full half-hour (we might think we're watching the Russian equivalent of Renoir's Partie De Campagne) lulls the viewer into a false sense of serenity. When Dimitri, an old lover of Kotov's young wife and now a government official, arrives, Mikhalkov allows our suspicion that Dimitri's visit isn't merely personal to accumulate slowly. The film flirts with sentimentality, especially in casting Mikhalkov's real-life daughter as Kotov's irresistibly cute little girl, but after all, the filmmaker's goal is to show the toll that a repressive political regime can exact on the lives of individual citizens. (AMG)

Nikita Mikhalkov - Neskolko dney iz zhizni I.I. Oblomova AKA A Few Days in the Life of I.I. Oblomov (1979)

Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov takes a break from emulating his beloved Chekhov to film the classic Ivan Goncharov novel Oblomov. The title character (played by Oleg Tabakov) is a 19th century Russian civil servant and landlord who chooses to go to bed one day--and never get up. Preferring to sleep his way through life rather than confront it, Oblomov is shaken from his slumbers by the arrival of a childhood friend Shtoltz. A series of flashbacks show why it is that this friend's presence gets Oblomov out of his 'jammies and back on his feet. Also known as A Few Days in the Life of I. I. Oblomov, this sprightly film is an excellent early example of the work of the director who would win a 1994 Oscar for his Burnt by the Sun. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Yakov Protazanov - Bespridannitsa AKA The bride without a dowry (1937)

From allmovie: Filmed in 1937 (in fact: 1936), the Russian film "Without Dowry" was released in America in 1946, one year after the death of its director, Yakov Protazanov. Produced on a far-less epic scale than most Protazanov films, this is a merciless satire of the Russian dowry system in particular and the Czarist regime in general. The heroine (Nina Alisova) is promised in marriage to a bureaucrat (Victor Balikhin), who is interested only in receiving the girl's dowry. Maintaining a gently comic tone throughout most of the proceedings, the story dovetails almost imperceptibly into tragedy. The musical score is based upon Tchaikovsky's 5th, with a few Russian folk songs woven in.

Yuri Ilyenko - Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala aka The Eve Of Ivan Kupalo (1968)

Banned by the Soviet authorities, Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala (The Eve of Ivan Kupalo) is widely held to be one of the masterpieces of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema. Adapted from a short story of Gogol, which had its roots in Ukrainian folklore, the film depicts an almost Faustian pact, in which Piotr makes an unholy deal with Bassaruv in order that he may win the hand of Pidorka from her father. The director Yuri Ilyenko brings the same rich, vivid imagery that he lent to Parajanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors where he worked as the cinematographer. The film often makes difficult first viewing for unaccustomed viewers due to its hallucinatory nature, but its lucid tapestry renders it a mandatory experience.

Aleksandr Sokurov - Zhertva vechernyaya AKA The Evening Sacrifice (1987)

Sokurov shows the official manifestation and fireworks on the 1st of May, one of the ritual celebrations of Soviet times, as a gathering of tired participants of a mass scene falling into pieces without the director’s orders and without any aims. Outbursts of joy without reason, mixed here and there with equally unmotivated signs of anxiety are given in brief sketches of a restless and pitiful crowd. A part instead of the whole, individual instead of common, a symbol growing up from details are the postulates of Eisenstein’s representation of the “people’s masses,” both the chorus and the protagonist of the Soviet official culture. Sokurov revises these postulates in the context of our time when the chorus has gone out of action, both in the aesthetic and in the social sense, and the protagonist is absent. However, both chorus and soloist are introduced into the picture of the festivity by the hand of the author: Sokurov puts a church canticle into the soundtrack of the film. It is an evening Orthodox prayer of repentance: “let my prayer be like incense before Thou, like my hands uplifted, an evening sacrifice.”

Aleksandr Sokurov - Odinokiy golos cheloveka aka The Lonely Voice Of Man (1987)

Made in 1977, and only finally released in 1987, this is Sokurov's first feature-length film. Extraordinarily beautiful, utilising an array of unusual stylistic devices, it seems as if Sokurov's style was fully formed from the outset. A sublime meditation on love, loneliness, life and death, it still stands as one of his finest achievements.

Aleksandr Sokurov - Tikhiye stranitsy aka Whispering Pages (1993)

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'Whispering Pages' may be the most dimly lit film ever made. Set to the strains of Mahler, this 1993 film takes place in a city whose streets are rarely penetrated by sunlight. Look hard enough and you'll discover the world of Dostoevsky, whose Crime and Punishment is the source of whatever scant plot exists in Whispering Pages.

Sokurov is one of the most painterly filmmakers alive, but he's seldom interested in conventionally pretty imagery (or conveying the same grandeur sought by his former mentor, Andrei Tarkovsky). Instead, Sokurov's images often seem flat and hollow, with the movie screen's two-dimensionality emphasized rather than disguised. Some of the images in the shadowy Whispering Pages -- like the wizened bureaucrat who covers his face with his newspaper or the prostitutes who wrestle in the street -- might as well have been made from woodcuts.