“A film of startling originality and beauty. Mr. Sokurov, a Russian director best known in America for RUSSIAN ARK (2002), makes films so far removed from the usual commercial blather that it sometimes seems as if he is working in another medium. His work is serious, intense, at times opaque and so feverishly personal that it also feels as if you’re being invited into his head, not just another reality… An enormously honest work… (A) remarkable film… a beautiful, eerie work of art about life and death and the love a grandson expresses when he plaits his grandmother’s hair.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A powerful accusation and a heartfelt elegy.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker


“One of the few roaring lions still producing genuine art-house cinema. Sokurov’s moving allegory… boils down nationalistic nurturing to a single tender, devastating gesture.”
– David Fear, Time Out NY

“ALEXANDRA is a much more modest undertaking [than RUSSIAN ARK], but is just as compelling. And Galina Vishnevskaya, an 81-year-old opera singer, is wonderful.”
– V.A. Musetto, The New York Post

“The filmmaking is masterful: ALEXANDRA is crisply shot and impeccably framed, less impressionistic than earlier Sokurov films, with an audio tapestry as densely woven as any by David Lynch or Gus Van Sant... His camera maneuvers to capture precise slivers of sunlight on the ground; the color is sun-bleached, the clouds of dust rise just so. The effect is fastidious, but too ethereal to be oppressive. Sokurov may not clarify the situation in Chechnya but…he illuminates its reality.”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“Raptly engaging! With gorgeous, washed-out colors and dreamy camera movement, ALEXANDRA suspends the viewer
in an elegiac, liminal state, attuned to the textures and murmurs of the world and to a sense of history passing.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The New York Sun

“Alexandra is played by national cultural treasure Galina Vishnevskaya. A celebrated actress and opera star,
and the widow of Mstislav Rostropovich, she’s about as grande dame as a babushka gets. Sokurov remains
a master of landscape and atmosphere, of charged imagery and poetic effect… In a film that emphasizes the act
of looking… Sokurov gives us plenty to marvel at.”
– James Quandt, ArtForum

“A flat-out masterpiece. Both a meditation on the futility of war, as well as a love story as big as the steppes.”
– Erica Abeel, Filmmaker magazine

“A life of struggle and dignity emanates from every pore. Sure, she’s Mother Russia, but she’s every mother viewing the wasted lives of young men and wondering why.
Hers is no operatic performance, à la Maria Callas: this is the soul of Eleonora Duse.”
– Jay Weissberg, Variety

The great Alexander Sokurov (RUSSIAN ARK, MOTHER AND SON) has made a powerful anti-war film in which not a shot is fired. Russian opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya stars as an elderly woman visiting her grandson, an officer stationed among the bored, weary troops at a desolate military outpost. More myth than contemporary politics -- the movie juxtaposes her womanly warmth with the hard steel of their weaponry; the value she places on their lives, with the pessimism of their mind set; her memories of family life and hopes for their future with the cynicism inherent in their mission.

RUSSIA • 2007 • 92 MINUTES • IN RUSSIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • THE CINEMA GUILD