I’ve still been watching Russian movies almost every evening, some of them together with my wife, Myra. I just haven’t been blogging about them.

Tonight I watched The Lady with the Little Dog (1960), a Chekov adaptation. One of the most superficial things I learned was at about 8:40 in the YouTube version that you can see by clicking on the above screenshot. I liked the way the driver of the sleigh in the right foreground reached back to pull up the blanket for his passenger and then, when the passenger was seated, put it back as a covering for his legs. He did it all in one motion as if this was the millionth time he had done it.

It’s something I had never seen before, either in real life or in the movies.

There are a lot of nice touches in this film. Good cinematography all the way through.

At this point I was puzzled. This can't be a Soviet movie from the 1960s, I thought. It's a good movie with good acting and good cinematography, not like a lot of American movie crap. But that kid, a sympathetic character, is acting like a kid ...

This fairy tale is fun, but it wasn't until the 4th or 5th watching that I understood this part. Now I recognize it. It's a custom I've seen in many other Russian movies where those leaving as well as those seeing the travelers off sit down quietly for luck before ...

I'm trying to figure out if this footage of Van Cliburn shown on the TV in Pyat Vecherov is really from his famous 1958 visit to Russia for the Tchaikowsky Competition, or if it's from some later visit in the 1960s. Nothing in the movie or the clip says outright ...

The guy on the left is Robot Verter, according to the credits. No wonder he talks so slowly and walks so stiffly. BTW, is there any science fiction movie with talking robots who speak rapidly, perhaps slurring their words and cracking jokes? For that matter, ...

I'm trying to understand the premise of this joke. Are there people in the Russian Federation, even the southern parts, who don't know who Felix Dzerzhinsky was? The movie (Den Vyborov - Election Day) is hillarious. I've watched it several times already. In this scene Kamil (played ...

Rodnya isn't turning out to be very good. We've watched two thirds of it. It still has a half hour to redeem itself, but I don't have my hopes up. Nonna Mordukova had a lot of good roles in her career, but maybe she and her director didn't have any idea ...

This site will be useful: List of Russian animation subtitled in English. I learned about it from Alexander Sedov's LiveJournal blog, where he explains why it was Shakespeare's King Richard who knocked on the door of Savushkin, who didn't believe in miracles, and then took off on Savushkin's motorcycle.

To American ears, it's a bit strange for Tamara Vasilyevna (played by Ludmila Gerchenko) to be asking the question, "Do the workers like you?" It's not a strange thing to wonder about, but it's a strange thing to be asking an old boyfriend about, or to be asking ...

The latest issue of Smithsonian magazine has an article about "Sherlock Holmes' London." In the print edition there are photos of some of the actors who have played the role, with the caption: Holmes has enjoyed a stellar career on-screen (clockwise from top-left: portrayed by Basil Rathbone, 1939; Jeremy Brett, ...