Why you can trust 12DOVE
After winning the best foreign film Oscar for his '94 epic Burnt By The Sun, Nikita Mikhalkov spent the next five years working on this lavish period romance. Unfortunately, while it contains some undeniably spectacular scenes (a carnival on a frozen lake, a full staging of Rossini's The Barber Of Seville), not enough happens to justify the epic running time.
Set in Tsarist Russia, the story tells of an American (Ormond) who comes to Moscow to help a crackpot inventor (Harris) finance a radical tree-cutting machine. En route she meets a young cadet (Menshikov) who falls head over heels in love with her.
The director betrays the scale of his ambition by christening the soldier Tolstoy, but his uneasy mix of melodrama and slapstick is no classic. And while shooting the pic in English enables Ormond to sport a convincing Yankee accent, the lumbering screenplay gives her few lines worth speaking.
The Total Film team are made up of the finest minds in all of film journalism. They are: Editor Jane Crowther, Deputy Editor Matt Maytum, Reviews Ed Matthew Leyland, News Editor Jordan Farley, and Online Editor Emily Murray. Expect exclusive news, reviews, features, and more from the team behind the smarter movie magazine.
Starfield's Premium Edition gets discounted to $70, which basically makes the Shattered Space DLC free before it even launches
Infinity Ward animator casually shares the coolest gun Call of Duty never made: the Whizzbanger, a meme of a pistol that fires 50 cal rounds with a sledgehammer
5 ways the new Superman movie costume blends details from over 80 years of comic book history, all the way back to 1938's Action Comics #1