Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

GazerRise Fantastic!

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

random_avenger Ever since hearing about Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's famous one-take film Russian Ark (2002), I've been interested in seeing some of his work as I generally like slow-paced atmospheric movies. Alexandra is the first Sokurov title I have seen and a quite pleasant film experience. The story deals with an elderly Russian woman Aleksandra Nikolaevna (Galina Vishnevskaya) who pays a visit to her grandson Denis (Vasily Shevtsov), an officer on a military camp in Chechnya. On the camp she is unbothered by the soldiers and spends her time examining the equipment or chatting with the personnel. She also befriends a Chechen woman named Malika (Raisa Gichaeva) during a trip to a local market place.The simple plot is mostly secondary to the mood created by the washed-out colours and the charismatic performance by the 80-year old opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya in the title role. The grumpy Aleksandra spends a lot of time mumbling to herself and walking wherever she wants to go only hindered by the fatigue of old age, while the camera lingers on details such as the bored young soldiers' faces when they look at her curiously. Vishnevskaya's performance radiates calm, distanced attitude towards the ongoing conflict and her scenes with the kind old lady Malika make a strong point about the futility of the war.Despite the setting at an active military camp, the mood is not warlike at all: instead, the atmosphere is shaped very melancholic by the oddly emotional music accompanying the uneventful scenes. Considering the down-to-earth style, the music actually feels a little too sentimental at times, as in this type of very low-key storytelling the emotions are to be created inside the viewer's head as opposed to being handed out by a manipulative score. Nevertheless, the film is not devoid of beautiful moments; particularly when Alexandra lets out her fear of growing old near the end she finally becomes a fuller character and is easy to sympathize with. The kind-looking Vasily Shevtsov fits well in the role of Denis, the target of the old woman's motherly love.Even though Sokurov's slow and quiet style will not appeal to everyone, Alexandra is a well made art film that inconspicuously touches many universal themes. Patient viewers may easily find a lot to like in it, so even if it is not quite among the top films of its ilk, it is certainly worth giving a good look.

nimimerkillinen Aleksandra is the movie that Putin disliked and Chechen banned. It's a movie about temperamental old lady who travels from Russia to Chechen to see her grandson in military base. The movie combines greatly aging and military. Story about a woman who doesn't want to get old while the others spend their aging time killing. There isn't any set decorations used, all is authentic. The military base, ruins, soldiers and the common people. Aleksandra is a great movie from one of Russians most interesting film-maker at the moment. If you aren't scared of slow and lifelike drama. This is very easy to recommend. It is humane, it is insightful.

Michael McGonigle In the 1976 comedy Love And Death, Woody Allen finds himself conscripted into the Russian Army about to fight Napoleon's invading French forces. While in basic training, a stern drill sergeant tries to explain the reality of things to the peasant soldiers who will soon shed their blood for Mother Russia.Drill Sergeant - If they kill more Russians, they win. If we kill more Frenchmen, we win.Woody – What do we win?This line always gets a laugh (and would be well worth asking any time WE feel the need to go to war), so why did that question come to mind after seeing Alexander Sokurov's breathtaking film Alexandra? I'll come to that momentarily.Alexandra is a film of deceptive simplicity. An older grandmother comes to a remote military base to visit her 27-year-old grand son who is a captain. While there, she is treated as an honored guest, almost like a beloved mascot and she gets to meet many different soldier boys as well as some of the locals who live in the destroyed towns around the base.Described this way, it would be hard to justify to your friends why you want to see a film about an old Babushka groaning around a military base always complaining about the heat for 95 minutes, but then you are not considering the surprises in store from the great Russian director Alexander Sokurov who has been described as a Russian David Lynch, but I think this is mistaken.If you must pigeonhole Sokurov, he has more in common with Gus Van Sant in his experimental mode with films like Last Days, Elephant and the recent Paranoid Park. Like Van Sant, Sokurov's films have seemingly straightforward narratives, but are then made brilliant by an unconventional way of telling the actual story as well as a utilizing unique ways of manipulating sound and image.What ultimately happens if you allow yourself to be seduced by the film, is the whole thing becomes an allegorical examination of the Russian soul and a meditation on why they often find themselves in no-win situations like Chechnya, which Alexandra is clearly about.But there are many things that I, as an American may not appreciate fully. For example, the solemn type of poetic love that Russians have for their mothers that is evident in everything from their literature to their music to their theater, (Americans loves their mothers too, but it is a bit different).I also can't fully understand the helpless feeling they have of being a "former" world power that finds itself bogged down in a country it could have once blown right off the map, but can now do nothing. (Don't worry; America could get there yet if we don't stop these Neo-Con morons with their selfish pursuits disguised as patriotism.)Then there is the casting of the film. The soldiers are all well played by handsome young actors with sweet, youthful faces, but it is the solid presence of Galina Vishnevskaya as Alexandra that holds this film together. I have read she was a well-known opera singer in Russia and considered a national treasure, although I was not familiar with her before this film.Considering what Galina Vishnevskaya had to do; literally embody Mother Russia as a concept while never ever losing her humanity, her performance is wonderfully understated, yet never less than powerful and compelling.It won't happen, but if Daniel Day Lewis can get an Oscar for grossly over-playing an evil oilman in There Will Be Blood, I hope Galina Vishnevskaya can at least get an Oscar nomination for portraying the historical soul of a nation all the while making her human and understandable.It is rare that films ever tackle things allegorically. That is usually reserved for the theatrics of the stage or the interior realms of the mind in a novel. Even if it were something that could be done more often, most Americans would not accept it.The American style of story telling is straightforward and blunt; whereas allegory relies on symbolism, and a transubstantiation of ideas and concepts into dramatic characters and situations.To many people, this all feels like trickery and they remain closed off to the richness of allegory, especially in the arts. Yet, crazily enough, they have no trouble accepting it every Sunday in church where Christians by the thousands believe that ordinary wine and bread get turned into the Blood and Bone of Christ.It really doesn't happen folks, (except symbolically) or that would make you cannibals. So if you can accept that kind of symbolic allegory and transmutation of concepts in church, it requires only a little bit more imagination to accept it in a film. Please try. You don't know what you're missing.Getting back to my opening citation of Love And Death and why Alexandra made me think of it, well, at the end of the film, as Alexandra is on her way back home, she looks at the passing Chechen countryside through the door of her train.It is dry, hot, and pretty much a wasteland. Yet, this is the very land the Chechens are more than willing to die for and really, what possible use could it be for the Russians? I hope Alexandra is considering Woody Allen's surprisingly simple, yet devastating question, after all the terror, all the horror and all the killing is over, "What do we win?"It turns out the answer is rolling right past Alexandra's eyes, outside the train door.Nothing.

tony-540 I do hope that people with some link to the Russian-Chechnian conflict get something out of this movie. Because as an outsider, I thought this movie was a horrendous creature, possibly one of the worst I have ever seen. The script seems to be non-existent, the dialogues are one big mumble, the supposedly 'meaningful' parts are so forced that they make one gag, but most importantly, the main actress, Galina Vishnevskaya, renders an awful performance, most of the times she just scared the hell out of me. I suggest - with all due respect, she has lived many years already - that she either sticks to opera, or offers her services as a soon to be cult horror character.Here and there, the director threw in some close-up shots (the braided hair, the Chechnian boy's face) and one time also the ominously outlined clouds in a Bergman-style; they made things only worse, because they gave me the awkward feeling that the director WAS actually trying to deliver something.I will not remember a powerful older lady putting her stamp on the young ignorant soldiers and the civilians living in a difficult conflict. All I will remember is an old woman, shuffling through an army camp, obviously lost, in every possible sense.