Review of Alexander Sokurov's The Sun (Chicago Tribune) (thanks, MK):
Very little happens in the usual sense. It is 1945. The ravages of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, glimpsed later, lay well outside the realm of the palace of Hirohito. The emperor, played by Issei Ogata, prepares for another day. His chamberlain (Shiro Sano) discusses the immediate agenda, while his other aides observe, listen, wonder about their fates. When the key encounter between Hirohito and Gen. Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson, miscast and diffident) arrives in "The Sun," it barely registers as dramatic, let alone momentous.
A consideration of Jean-Luc Godard's rarely-shown film The Kids Play Russian (Les enfants jouent à la Russie, 1993) (lights in the dusk).
Review of Karen Shakhnazarov's Vanished Empire, about perestroika-era youth (Seattle Post Globe):
Every generation has its vanished empire, its city of the wind, the one blown away by time. In Karen Shakhnazarov’s magnificent new film, that city and that time is the Moscow of 1970’s, where a group of college friends, with an emphasis on a love triangle involving classmates Sergei, Stepan, and Lyuda, express their youth by rebelling against the rules of the Soviet game.Thorold Dickinson's Queen of Spades re-released (Herald Scotland). Sherlock Holmes, Russian trailer.
