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Khrustalyov, My Car!

1998 2h 17m Drama History Crime List
100% Tomatometer 7 Reviews 89% Popcornmeter 100+ Ratings
General Klenski is arrested in 1953 after being accused of being a participant in a plot during an anti-Semitic political campaign.

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Khrustalyov, My Car!

Critics Reviews

View All (7) Critics Reviews
Tara Brady Irish Times Shot in stark, high-contrast monochrome, a ceaseless, roving camera, Altmanesque overlapping dialogue and entirely random incidents make for chaotic viewing. Rated: 4/5 Dec 28, 2018 Full Review Peter Bradshaw Guardian Dreamlike scenarios unfold, fragments of gnomic dialogue tumble out, all depicted with a vivid, documentary realism. Rated: 5/5 Dec 14, 2018 Full Review Rob Aldam Backseat Mafia A bleached out monochrome mix of purgatorial realism, slapstick nihilism, emotionless brutality and surrealist nightmare. Apr 25, 2019 Full Review Joshua Brunsting The CriterionCast This is a film of spit and paranoia, a truly raw satire that looks even better than it did 20 years ago thanks to a loving, new restoration. Dec 14, 2018 Full Review Dennis Schwartz Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews One of the great Russian films about how the Soviet Union works as a police state. Rated: A- Jun 30, 2015 Full Review Robin Clifford Reeling Reviews Watching Alexei German films is akin to watching those by Hungarian auteur Bella Tarr - you may not be able to figure out the story but it sure is interesting to watch from the visual viewpoint. Rated: B Jun 1, 2012 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

View All (7) audience reviews
Eithan D It's a mush of godknowswhat with no coherent story. If you're high it'll be fun for a while as it's not dumb, just very surrealist Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 04/03/23 Full Review Nawt W Both a solemnly realistic recollection and a "what if" scenario that is stuffed with a thoroughly misguided victim complex of Aleksey German. As usual, there isn't any semblance of a plot; it's an outline, and even with the annotation in the beginning, for the first hour, you will not understand what is actually occurring. The second part of the movie picks up, probably because the scenes transition away from his usual structure of eavesdropping on abrupt conversations, where dialogue overlaps and the camera defiantly doesn't want to show who was talking without a significant lag. The pace of the dialogue is, naturally, completely deranged and only fully comprehensible when two people are talking. If you feel that the sound is botched and appears to have been recorded in the other dimension, never fear, because German also knew that. He tried to make it way too complicated and basically create the entire ambience in post-production. But it didn't work. Obviously, it's not his fault. It's the plebs in the studio. Wonder why other movies from Russia in the 1990s barely had this problem? Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/26/23 Full Review nefasto r As Bob Belcher once said: "It was long and boring and made me want to stop supporting the arts and start actively working against them." Loved the quirkiness in some scenes, and the photography though. But that was not enough. Rated 2 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member ?????? ?????????? ????????. ?????? , ??????? ?? ????? ????? ??????????. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/27/23 Full Review walter m In "Khrustalyov, My Car!" General Klensky(Yuriy Tsurilo) is the head of a mental hospital in the former Soviet Union. The insanity that he witnesses there carries over to his family life which is depicted in the same madcap and whirligig way. What can be inferred is that this is set during the Stalinist reign of terror, replete with random people being disappeared right, left and center while it would take more information to identify everybody in Klensky's home to any satisfaction. There is also a key turning point in history that the movie treats in as matter of fact way as humanly possible. Which is the way history usually happens in real time. Except I'm sure the participants would have some feeling as to what was about to change, no matter what the movie may think. At least, it chooses the perfect moment to end on. Rated 3 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member fellinesque classic about the month of Stalin's death. forget the plot--info overload and hard to follow-but the telling, man the telling is gorgeous and crazy. a meta film about the soul of that era and the politics of representation in the Soviet system. dimly lit black and white carnivalesque attitude emphasise the aesthetics of disgust and the power relatiobships. a critic for the Guardian put it best: "resembles nothing else in cinema—although if Fellini, Tarkovsky and Tati had pooled resources to update a Gogol story, they might have matched it …. Aleksei German's film … may be Russian cinema's answer to Finnegans Wake" -Jonathan Romney. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/16/23 Full Review Read all reviews
Khrustalyov, My Car!

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Cast & Crew

No God, No Master 73% 45% No God, No Master Amen 67% 82% Amen The Baader Meinhof Complex 85% 80% The Baader Meinhof Complex East-West 65% 88% East-West The Learning Curve 13% % The Learning Curve Discover more movies and TV shows. View More

Movie Info

Synopsis General Klenski is arrested in 1953 after being accused of being a participant in a plot during an anti-Semitic political campaign.
Director
Aleksey German
Producer
Aleksandr Golutva, Armen Medvedev, Guy Seligmann
Screenwriter
Aleksey German, Svetlana Karmalita, Pekka Lehto
Genre
Drama, History, Crime
Original Language
Russian
Release Date (Streaming)
Apr 21, 2019
Runtime
2h 17m
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