Filming Locations: Mosfilm Studios, Moscow, Russia
Box Office Details
Budget: $4,000,000
(estimated)
Opening Weekend: RUR 43,112,631
(Russia)
(23 September 2007)
(357 Screens)
Gross: $125,024
(USA)
(21 June 2009)
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Did You Know?
Trivia:
The movie has an epigraph ("Don't look here for the truth of everyday life, but try to feel the truth of being") and an epilogue ("The law comes before everything, but what's to be done if the mercy comes before the law?"). Both are quotations from one B. Tosia. Most probably, he (or she) never lived and is the fictional alter ego of Nikita Mikhalkov.
Goofs:
Revealing mistakes:
"Ernest Emerson" is a manufacturer of knives from the USA. However their model, CQC7, is not like the knife on the film. Emerson knives are folding knives.
User Review
Not a remake, but an investigation into today's Russia
Rating: 10/10
Sure, it is difficult and will be difficult for all those who have seen
Sidney Lumet's Twelve angry men to avoid recalling part of that
wonderful movie where, like in this, we move between great characters
and excellent actors to investigate about the meaning of personal
involvement in the life of a community.
However, apart from the similar elements that we'll find, this movie
achieves, as only a few films have done, to investigate the mechanisms
of the current Russian society from the inside. Michalkov is greatly
helped in this task not only by an excellent scenario and direction but
also by a cast of actors that achieves perfection (including himself as
the president of the jury).
The picture of the Russia of today is not optimistic (I would be
tempted to say that rarely this has been the case in Russian history),
and what appears clear is the capacity of the Russian people, that also
emerge from the Russian literature and opera, to struggle and survive
in the middle of chaos and brutality. If there is hope, it is in the
tenacity of the individuals to be committed to fight...but when will
this fight come to a (positive) end?
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