«Сквозь грозы сияло нам солнце свободы » day.kyiv.ua - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from day.kyiv.ua Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Print
Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Dear Comrades!” dramatizes the deadly events of June 2, 1962, when Soviet government forces fired into a crowd of unarmed protesters in the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk. It took 30 years for the tragedy to be revealed and reckoned with: The bodies were buried in secret and all news of the bloody crackdown was meticulously suppressed, never to be officially investigated and brought to light until 1992, after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Another three decades would pass before the massacre would be memorialized in Konchalovsky’s blistering new film, the latest fascinating object in a career that has swerved unpredictably from Russia to Hollywood and back again. (The movie has been chosen to represent Russia in the Oscar race for international feature.)
What’s new to VOD and streaming this weekend
Including reviews of A Glitch In The Matrix, Falling, Malcolm & Marie, Rams and Greenland By Norman Wilner
N
OW critics pick what’s new to streaming and VOD for the weekend of February 5. Plus: Everything new to VOD and streaming platforms.
Falling
(Viggo Mortensen)
Mortensen’s first feature as a writer/director finds the actor shaping a simple father-son story into a powerful meditation on compassion at any cost. It’s not perfect, but it’s powerful. Mortensen plays John, a gay man who’s taken a week off to bring his ailing father Willis (Lance Henriksen) out west from his rural New York farm. Willis is suffering from dementia and rapidly deteriorating, and John is looking to make things easier on the old man – but Willis’s illness has only amplified the fury, misogyny and homophobia that drove his family away decades earlier. Falling is rough in the way that first films can be, but even when something doesn
Bob Strauss February 2, 2021Updated: February 3, 2021, 2:51 pm
A scene from “Dear Comrades!,” directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Photo: Sasha Gusov, Neon
Russia’s official entry for this year’s international feature Academy Award is a film about Soviet forces massacring their own people a true 1962 crime that was covered up for a good three decades afterward.
So, things have changed, as “Dear Comrades!” shows us with meticulous historical re-creation, searing anger and devastating pain. But it does so at a time when Russians across that vast nation are protesting in support of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and a month after a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, which makes the film’s scenes of angry rioters threatening bureaucrats and trashing government buildings look all too recent even despite the film being in ’60s-style, square-framed black-and-white.
Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has gone back to his beginnings for his latest film.
Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has gone back to his beginnings for his latest film. The real-life events on which
Dear Comrades! is based took place in June 1962, when social unrest over rising prices saw strikes break out in Novocherkassk, an industrial town in Russia’s south, culminating in street protest against the Soviet regime. The very idea of such an uprising was, of course, anathema in the “workers’ paradise” that was the communist system, and it was brutally suppressed by the Kremlin. The extent of the casualties was concealed, the dead secretly buried, and the events practically written out of history for almost four decades.