Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Leonardo M. D'Espósito If you think "A drama from Russia", you'll be wrong. This is a very strange satyre of old Russian literacy and melodrama, told with a wit humour and great originality. Just see: there is a blind woman who falls in love at first sight ("Victor Ivanovich!"), a villain who claims for his nurse, a couple of siamese twins (and one of them couches with the girlfriend of the other...and the other don't have a clue!) and much, much more. Everything is filmed as a mute drama, but in fact it's a very intelligent parody. Just try it. It's an excellent film and contains a lot of comments about politics, cinema, literacy and a very good comic approach at the Dostoïevskian tradition in writing. The use of intertitles and black and white photo it's perfect. And in the second half, there is a lot of good laughs.

lusikny It is sad that some find this film worth watching. I am Russian, and I am disgusted. There is nothing in this film that deserves praise, except cinematography. However, I am not one of those who find beauty in death or perversion. I think this film is poorly designed and directed. There is nothing more irritating and even enraging than shameless speculation in art (if you can call this garbage art). Balabanov wanted to shock the viewers by pervasive evil, and he succeeded in creating a hopelessly dark film. But the biggest shock is Balabanov's primitive directorial work. I would never advise any of my friends to watch it. Huge disappointment!

rakovsky On the outside, Of Freaks and Men is about the Mafia and Hitting Porn. Yet the Message is deeper than found in many hollywood movies. Of Freaks and Men is telling you something where it is not telling you something. It doesn't say what the relationship between Johan and "nanny" is. Why does Johan cry so much when she dies? She is unawares of her surroundings except when she is beating someone. In tsarist russia, these beatings were common until the Bolshevik Revolution outlawed beatings in 1917. Schools ended all forms of punishment. This film is easier to understand for Russians who commonly see erotica on TV, than for Americans for whom erotica signifies a porno flick. For aristocratic cultures, like Britain, the "english nanny" plays the twisted role portrayed in the film. They are not parents. An erotic element usually underlies relationships. Lisa's nanny is Johan's sister who was probably raised by the same nanny in turn. Grunya does not react any more than Johan does when she sees Lisa beaten. How does Lisa get a fascination with beatings? The film raises these questions but does not answer them. Despite all the pornography, the song of the cab-driver in the movie has a meaning deeper than found in American movies, and one that is not understood in the US. School beatings are a "way of life" in the South, says a Texas youth. Corporal punishment causes crime and sexual problems because it is both.

jandesimpson Every so often one has the pleasure of discovering a film so unusual that it seems that nothing has influenced it in its creation of a world all its own. One such was David Lynch's "Eraserhead", another, Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter" and now to join the august company is Alexsei Balabanov's "Of Freaks and Men". By dressing up a most scurrilous plot in images of extraodinary elegance and beauty the director has created an astonishingly original entertainment. Turn of the century St. Petersburg is hauntingly captured in beautiful sepia visuals of waterways and bridges, classical exteriors and upper class salons. But behind this facade the very devil is at work in the form of a gang of pornographic photographers who insinuate themselves into the lives of two respectable families whom they summarily proceed to corrupt. In due course the daughter of a highly respected engineer is enjoying having her naked buttocks spanked by an old crone in front of the camera, while the blind wife of a doctor in the other household becomes infatuated with another member of the gang who is only there to satisfy his paedophiliac fascination with the adolescent boy Siamese twins she and her husband have adopted. And this only for starters! As things go from bad to worse and goings on become more depraved - although admittedly we see no more than the odd spanking - the visuals become ever more beautiful particularly when the twins travel to the snowbound east and the girl travels west to wander a townscape of blowing autumn leaves. I think Balabanov is trying to say something about the voyeuristic nature of the camera and the progress of photography from still to moving pictures. To probe for deeper meanings wound not be very fruitful from a film whose raison d'etre, I suspect, is simply to intrigue and delight.