Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Freaktana A Major Disappointment

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

TxMike This is one of Robin Williams's very early movies just a couple of years after the TV series 'Mork and Mindy' and right before such successes as 'Good Morning Vietnam' and what followed. Of course now we know what a big star he became, and also his unfortunate death last year.Robin Williams is Russian musician Vladimir Ivanoff and most of the first part of the movie depicts how hard it was in Moscow in the early 1980s. When a performance troupe is in New York he takes the bold step of running off at a department store, chased by Russian officials, but he manages to secure refuge.The rest of the movie has him working hard to make his new home there, thus 'Moscow on the Hudson.' He first takes a job busing tables in a restaurant, just carrying dirty dishes back to the dishwasher. Eventually he takes jobs like clerk at a fast food counter, running a street hot dog cart, a limo driver ... until he is able to get a new saxophone and play good music gigs.The other running story is his attraction to pretty (actually Hispanic) Maria Conchita Alonso as Italian Lucia Lombardo, also making her way into this new land. It is on again, off again because she is not sure she wants to commit to a marriage relationship but in the end it seems they will.Good movie and Williams' Russian seems fairly authentic. I saw it on the 'Movies!' channel, some of the scene with the two of them in the bathtub is blurred and some words are bleeped out.

jeremy3 This movie reminds me of how much things have changed in the last 25 years. This movie was still in the days when there was the naive and simple belief that America could be a "great place". Robin Williams brilliantly portrays the Russian circus musician who ends up defecting. Williams plays Alexander with great sensitivity and humor. Russia is portrayed almost as it was. America is not perfect. The black store security guard he meets has a family that hasn't found work in years. Alexander has to work really hard to make a new life for himself. Still, the movie had the Capra-esquire belief that a new immigrant can find happiness in America. I am sad to say that those days are gone. The idea that he and his girlfriend can work it out, and that Alexander can find success in life, has been replaced by "political correctness". Movies like Moscow On The Hudson remind us that the naive and simple days weren't really so bad. We definitely need to recapture that spirit again nowadays.

ccthemovieman-1 Robin Williams became famous, I think, for his stand-up comedy, like his idol Jonathan Winters, but do you realize how many movies this guy has made over the years? He's really become quite a film star and is especially good playing against-type as a criminal or simply as a wacko (see "One Hour Photo?")Anway, this was an early Robin Williams film in which he plays a Russian musician defecting to the United States. He ("Vladamir Ivanoff") first hides out in a big store in New York City before being taken in as an immigrant by a black guy (can you say PC?) Williams does an outstanding job speaking Russian, by the way, as opposed to most English-speaking actors.There really isn't much of a plot here, just slices of life, if you will, some of it with the usual Liberal promiscuous (i.e. "I'm a liberated woman and if I stay the night, don't misinterpret that I want to get involved with you," the Italian tells the Russian. I can think of a few more accurate descriptions that the word "liberated.")All in all, despite the premise and talents of Williams, this was only so-so. It kind of runs out of steam halfway through and it's hard to maintain interest in the final 40 percent of it. Actually, I like Williams better when he plays more serious roles like this although I'm not sure if he himself was ready to play it straight this early in his career. He's just too tempted in this film to produce comedy. He's a talented and very strange guy; this film reflects that.

Erik Flesch Moscow on the Hudson is a fabulous example of a pretty-good movie chock full of 1980s artifacts like Jordache jeans, feathered hair-dos and Afro Sheen, that is often surprisingly interesting, sensitive and even occasionally profound -- especially on the level of the victory of the individual soul over totalitarianism, and the defense of American capitalism against Marxism.This film brings back a flood of cultural memories of the Eighties, the decade immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time in the United States when our political and cultural self-esteem matched our economic prosperity. It doesn't hurt that this movie stars a young bearded Robin Williams with heart (and Russian soul!) and a really cute and occasionally nude young Maria Conchita Alonso (a real-life Venezuelan immigrant) full of Italian passion and an ambitious independent spirit.Only in the early 1980s could blue jeans from Bloomies, velvety white toilet paper, supermarket coffee, studio apartments, hot-dog stands, cab-driving jobs, and U.S. citizenship ceremonies be portrayed as symbols -- indeed even weapons -- of democratic capitalism in a world still governed "from Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea" by the totalitarian evil against which President Ronald Reagan called a crusade two years earlier in his famous 1982 Evil Empire speech to the House of Commons.The political content of the movie is startlingly black-and-white by today's standards of multiculturalism and moral relativism when many academics defend dictatorships' "sovereign right" to exist, and so the offhand manner with which at every turn the film's writers Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos deliver praise to political liberty, capitalism and America's unique cultural acceptance of immigrants dedicated to the pursuit of happiness is remarkable. While the way in which their praises are conveyed may from time-to-time seem a little cheesy, sentimental or dated, their profound significance is not diminished.Exactly because capitalism is an economic system as well as a social system, Robin William's character is portrayed as a Russian seeking a remedy for his literal physical hunger and basic financial requirements of life that socialism fails to satisfy. His Russian friend, played wonderfully by Elya Baskin, suffers from socialism's other often dramatized evil -- its humiliating and paralyzing effect on an individual's creative mind and psychology. Perhaps it is precisely because the film's focus is on Williams' character that Moscow on the Hudson at times comes off as exhibiting the over-the-top 1980s commercialism that made it popular then and a little startling in today's Greener age.Russophiles can get a kick out of some of the Russia scenes. Highlights include the drab Moscow Circus on Tsvetnoi Boulevard including full-figured women in polyester; sour old babushkas enforcing their place in line; and shoe vendors pushing the wrong sizes. They might also find some treatment of Soviet atrocities like sending war protesters to mental institutions, or neighbors reporting dissidents to the KGB a bit trite, but not inaccurate. Such horrors are no less relevant in Putin's Russia of today (October 2006), where the most recent contract killing of independent politicians, businessmen and intellectuals is journalist Anna Politkovskaya.While I've focused on the political content, this movie is not primarily a political piece, but a love story; and not primarily a love story, but a romance of personal initiative -- of immigrants who choose to reject the oppressive circumstances they left behind and to seize the chance to pursue their material survival and eventually, individual happiness. The aims of the film are high, maybe even too high at times for this light film to be able to achieve fully; but it is definitely touching and fairly deals with the array of issues every immigrant faces on a variety of levels. I personally found the love relationship between Williams and Alonso to be touchingly realistic at times; and the individualistic focus of this film to be refreshing, as well as a shocking reminder of how inappropriately self-conscious the American media has become in publicly asserting the universal truth and appeal of its core principles: freedom and capitalism.