Vadim Medvedev

The teenager Misha Polyakov, being with his mother in a Ukrainian village on vacation with his grandmother and about to return home to Petrograd, offers his best friend Genka to go with him. Suddenly, a white gang of Nikitsky bursts into the village and attacks Misha’s house, where Commissioner Polevoy lives. The purpose of Nikitskiy (aka Nikolskiy) is a dagger located at Polevoy. Saving the commissioner, Misha learns from him the history and secret of the weapon, and receives it for storage with a request to solve the secret. Having returned with adventures to Petrograd, Misha Polyakov with friends begins to unravel the riddle of the dagger, in the handle of which is encrypted text.

Italy, XIX century. The country is occupied by Austrian troops, the resistance movement is actively developing. Student Arthur Burton is involved in the activities of the underground organization “Young Italy”, envies its leader, Giovanni Bolla, and is jealous of his bride Gemma. He talks about this at a confession to a priest, as a result of which gendarmes take revolutionaries under arrest...

Andrey Pavlovich Buzykin, who makes a living by teaching at an institute and translating English literature, is cheating on his wife. Buzykin's main problem is that he's a kind man with a weak character. The lies he is telling his wife all the time are inconvincing, but he never has the courage to tell her the truth. His lover, Alla, is aware of his family life, but gets offended when, for example, he cannot meet her so that he doesn't come home late, or when he doesn't want to go home in a new jacket she gives him to avoid having to explain to his wife. Alla and Nina, Andrei's wife, both leave him, forgive him, and return to him at the same time, and Andrei continues with this kind of life, full of suffering and deceit. Finally, both women are so fed up with his lies that they don't believe him even when he is telling the truth...

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.

For many years, Vassa Zheleznova has been leading the family business and, despite the inconspicuous children, her dissolute husband, alcoholic brother, and revolutionary daughter-in-law, is trying to maintain at least the appearance of a normal family... 1913 is coming, and everything that was dedicated to her life is wrecked.

Soviet spy Ladeynikov learns that in one of the pharmaceutical centers in a small resort town works a former German war criminal, Dr. Hass, who is finishing the creation of a deadly chemical gas RH development that he began during World War II, experimenting on POWs. Since Ladeynikov doesn't know Dr. Hass's appearance, Soviet intelligence recruits an actor, Ivan Savushkin, who, during the war, escaped from a prison camp where Hass was testing his gas. Together, they must identify and stop him before he finishes and unleashes his weapon of mass destruction.

Eugene Onegin, a jaded young dandy from the big city of St. Petersburg, travels to the country to ingratiate himself into the affection of a dying uncle. There he meets the idealistic and romantic poet Vladimir Lensky, who introduces him to the daughters of a local landowner.

Screen adaptation of Tchaikovsky's opera based on the Aleksandr Pushkin short story of the same name.