mateoxx59 Finally KGB colonel Mihalkov shows his real face !In this awful movie, we see a good (!?!?) Bolshevik colonel, in... 1936 !Since 1933 till 1936, only in Ukraine, more than THREE MILLIONS died by starvation, because of these 'good' or bad Bolsheviks ! How many of the Russian elite died in the so called 'revolution' and the years that follows ? Ten millions ? 15 ? 20 millions ?How many Baltics, Moldavians, Caucasians or central Asia people died in Siberia camps, Ural or Arctic mines ? How many hundreds thousands of land workers, engineers, teachers, lawyers ?All the high Bolsheviks were bloody criminals, without exception, starting with Lenin, Trotski or Stalin.See also their children: Mao, Kim Ir Sen, Fidel, Ceausescu, Enver Hodja, Pol Pot etc etc.Try 2 serious movies about the reds: Soviet Story, 2008 or Katyn, 2007.

tomb_92 I'd never actually seen an Academy Award Best Foreign Language winner until I saw this and my hopes were pretty high. I have to say I was a little disappointed. Firstly, the film was beautiful to watch. The locations really showed off the sheer beauty of Russia (I presume it was shot in Russia, and secondly the whole thing really did feel like a piece of art- carefully crafted and lovingly put together. I applaud the making of. However, the acting quality was inconsistent. Mikhalkov was very good at the lovable "uncle Jo" figure. Every moment he was on screen his presence felt commanding despite the kind jolly figure he played. I think that Oleg Menshikov stole the show. His portrayal of a bitter, vengeful man started off very subtle until he built it into something of a madman at the end, was brilliant. Mikhalkova was also wonderful to watch as the young girl, innocent and sweet, yet curious and smart. I do feel that some of the supporting cast were a little pointless, a few of them need not have been there perhaps, it added to the confusion of the film. Next, the story was really gripping, once it got going. I have no problem with a film starting slow and moving and a slow pace but this film of just over 2 hours felt like well over 2 and a half. I did thing the story was really interesting and once I got into it I really did feel the terror of Stalin's brutal regime. It was also an interesting film morally, I constantly felt myself drawn between the two main characters, not sure who to root for, which I felt was wrong because it was kind of obvious, I felt, who was supposed to be the villain. The ending also felt a little odd. With all of the build up that finally got going I felt that the ending was too underwhelming. I felt a little let down, I kind of got the message about Stalin but I felt that after all the build up it kind of didn't go anywhere. It was still a really good film and well worth watching for the performance of the leads and the scenery.

gizmomogwai Like the Italian film Life Is Beautiful which came three years later, Burnt by the Sun is an excellent foreign movie combining humour and colourful characters to depict tragedy in the first half of the twentieth century. Burnt focuses on Russia in 1936, just before the Great Purge. This movie isn't as funny as the beginning of Life Is Beautiful, but some whimsical discussion is heard of summer Santas and wizards; there's piano playing with a gas mask; there's a question about leaving the zoo. But this is a mostly serious movie. It shows a very close relationship between a Russian colonel, Kotov, and his young daughter Nadya. Then it bluntly shows Kotov being arrested, torn from her life. In this way, Burnt by the Sun reveals the human tragedy of Stalin's paranoia and purges.There's more- though Kotov is a man destroyed by the Soviet Union, the unfortunate irony is that he was actually a patriotic and loyal Soviet. The scene where he and his daughter are on a boat underlines that fact, and makes what happens later look tragically needless.I first saw this gem in a university class on the Soviet Union. It came with a disclaimer from the professor that sending people to summer homes of Stalin's victims was not the way the Purges were really done. Like Life Is Beautiful, we have to bend realism a bit, but it's worth it. I'm not sure if this movie needed the mysterious orb of light; when I saw it hovering over a field, I asked my professor if it was going to make a crop circle. Actually it was just symbolism. The ball of light and the sun mentioned in the title are the Russian Revolution, and this movie is about people burnt by it. Equating the Revolution to something warm and bright makes me wonder if the Revolution is seen in this movie as a mostly good thing; but this movie shows there were also negative consequences. Orb of light or no orb of light, this movie is still memorable and wonderful.

G K That rarity: Burnt By The Sun is a film that feels as if the people who made it lived through the period it describes. During an idyllic summer in the mid-1930s Russia, a flamboyant colonel's (Nikita Mikhalkov) household is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of a figure from the past.The ugly betrayals of the Stalin era are documented in as pretty and lulling as any picture to have emerged from Russia in recent times; an advanced degree of historical and political scholarship may be required to grasp all the film's resonances. Burnt By The Sun received the Grand Prize at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, among many other honours.