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This collection surveys recent developments in Russian cinema and introduces undergraduate students to significant films released between 2005 and 2016 that are also available with English subtitles. Essays on individual films provide background on directors' careers, detailed analyses of selected films, along with suggestions for further readings both in English and Russian.

  The scientist, who now lives as a demi-god nobleman ([Leonid Yarmolnik]), does not interfere with the depravity that surrounds him: he merely wanders through it, often blindly drunk and playing jazz loudly. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken as slack- jawed peasants peer into the lens. There is something of Bela Tarr in the film's meandering design, although German's fetid carnivalesque presentation often leaves the eyes to wander where they may. There is no escaping German's world of feculence: if we are inclined to look away, there are characters onscreen sniffing audibly or raising their filthy fingers to their nose. (What a relief the viewer isn't issued with Odorama scratch'n' sniff cards.)

Nor is the richly layered black-and-white film a stylistic departure, for it is the apotheosis of techniques in his films \"Khrustalyov, My Car!\" (1998) (perhaps its closest rival in seething intensity), \"My Friend Ivan Lapshin\" (1984) and even his hard-nosed 1971 war drama, \"Trial on the Road.\"

Gradually, after the fall of communism in Russia, German's films were screened at cinematheques and festivals in the west. Khrustalyov, My Car!, the only one of his works that was not banned, provoked a mass walkout by critics at the 1998 Cannes film festival. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the 150-minute film was \"incomprehensible for long stretches and unforgivably unfunny in the endless scenes of manic visual satire\". Martin Scorsese, who was president of the Cannes jury, remarked that German's film obviously deserved the Palme d'Or, but he wasn't able to convince his fellow jurors because he didn't really understand it. Since then, many critics, initially confused by the opaque narrative and overwhelmed by its black humour and nightmarish vision of Russia during the last days of Stalin, have acclaimed the film. Also banned for some years, for similar reasons, was German's second film, Twenty Days Without War (1976), a restrained examination into the nature of truth, in which a novelist and war correspondent, Major Lopatin (Yuri Nikulin, the comic actor and circus performer, cast against type), has 20 days leave after the Battle of Stalingrad to visit his home town in Tashkent, where a \"positive\" war film, based on his army memoirs, is being made. Beginning with a tour-de-force 10-minute take on a train, the film displays German's eye for detail as Lopatin soon discovers people's perceptions of the \"great patriotic war\" are very different from what he has experienced, making him realise that those who stayed at home need romantic and heroic illusions. \"We can't have a film without a heroic act,\" he is told by the producer of the film-within-the-film.

\"Smoking kills 300,000 Americans a year,\" he said in one talk. \"Smokers are 10 times more likely to develop lung cancer than nonsmokers, two times more likely to develop heart disease. Smoking a pack a day takes six years off a person's life.\" \"The main thing was neither the crime story nor the love story, but that period of time itself,\" Mr. [Aleksei German] said in an interview. \"That's what we were making a movie about. To convey that period was our main and most difficult task.\" Aleksei Yuryevich German was born in Leningrad on July 20, 1938, the son of Yuri German, a Soviet writer on whose stories \"Trial of the Road\" and \"My Friend [Ivan Lapshin]\" were based.

Com belíssima fotografia em um preto e branco granulado, crepuscular, e uma câmera animada por movimentos virtuosísticos, German conta a história de Iuri Klenski, general do Exército Vermelho e o mais brilhante neurocirurgião do país. Debochado, bebedor e irascível, Klenski divide o tempo entre a família numerosa, as amantes e os doentes.

Aleksei Iu. German's film My Friend Ivan Lapshin, based on prose works written by his late father lurii P. German (1910-1967), was completed in 1983 and released two years later to some scandal. The prose works themselves had quite a different fate. The elder German published prolifically during some of the most repressive periods of Russian literary history, from the 1930s through the 1960s, although most of his works were published in the earlier two decades. His first works appeared in print in 1931 in Molodaia gvardiia and he continued to publish in this journal throughout the decade; his published works of the 1930s and 1940s include Our Acquaintances (1934), Our Friend the Militiaman (1940) and Stories about Feliks Dzerzhinsky (1947). Aleksei German states that his father held steadfast to his faith in communism, despite the occasional political difficulties he encountered during the course of his career. The son insists that the ideas which pervade so many of his father's published works were not a product of careerism, but rather of his world view: he truly believed in socialist realism.