Aleksandr Kostomolotsky

In Imperial Russia, Anna, wife of the officer Karenin, goes to Moscow to visit her brother. On the way, she meets charming cavalry officer Vronsky, to whom she's immediately attracted. But in St. Petersburg’s high society, a relationship like this could destroy a woman’s reputation.

Russian nobleman Fyodor Ivanovich Lavretsky returns to his estate after years in Paris, only to fall in love with his young cousin Liza, complicating his already troubled marriage and leading to a tragic, emotionally complex romance.

A surreal film done in the style of a silent farce.

Typically of the heady days of early Soviet cinema, this is constructed according to the fast, sharp editing principles advocated by Eisenstein, complete with symbolic inserts; but in terms of subject matter, it's much less explicitly political than most movies emerging from Russia in the '20s. Chronicling a young sailor's descent into a murky, treacherous underworld of pimps and thieves, after having encountered a Louise Brooks lookalike at a fairground and missed his departing boat, it's a lively moral fable that delights in vivid visual effects and quirky characterisations. If the plot occasionally reveals gaping holes, and the tacked-on ending urging the clearance of the Leningrad slums seems to be rather gratuitous, there's enough going on to keep one attentive and amused.

A loose Communist adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel. The serf Egor Efimov, a talented violinist, dreams of true art. Released by his landlord, he goes to the capital. But cold, bureaucratic St. Petersburg quickly destroys his illusions.