Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Lee Eisenberg Aleksandr Sokurov's "Aleksandra" depicts an elderly woman visiting her grandson on a military base in Chechnya. We don't see where the title character comes from, but we get a feeling of how this is a new world to her. In that sense, one might interpret the movie as a look at how our tendency to stay in comfort zones blinds us to the rest of the world."Aleksandra" is one of those deliberately slow-moving films; it takes time to get to know the characters. The cast is not anyone likely to be recognizable to non-Russian audiences, but that doesn't matter. The point is that this movie is not a political statement about the situation in Chechnya, it's merely a look at this one woman's exposure to this new world within her own country. Not a masterpiece, but I found it to be a good movie. Intense, but worth seeing.

Aristides-2 Much of the shorter dialogue read in subtitles to me as almost being non-sequiturs. "You're pulling my arm out!" This being said when the visual action showed nothing of the kind? This repeated sort of response had a deadly effect on me since it caused me to remain a great distance from most of the characters. If the translation was right on the money then Is this how they speak to one another? Mamet-speak? From the visual performance of Alexandra I found a largely cold and unsympathetic person, seemingly caring only for herself and occasionally for her grandson. I also found something strange about how many of the young soldiers looked at her. On a couple of occasions, even though I instinctively knew the story wasn't going to go there, I thought some minor indiscretion was about to take place. I found A.'s wandering into a war-brutalized Chechnian town unbelievable; she would have been waylaid and robbed. All in all I found situation after situation of the interactions of the soldiers with each other as well as with her strange and hard to fathom. Is the director saying this is what war does to soldiers? Having been in service during a war, though not in a combatant role, any time a female civilian dropped into our midst away from the shooting, at a base or facility, we were solicitous to the point of high sentiment: these were our mothers, sisters, girlfriends, grandmothers. Are we to believe that the unemotional looks the young Russian soldiers were aiming at Alexandra meant they are a species so far, far removed from their young American counterparts? Strange and remote movie, this 'Alexandra'.

Seamus2829 Alexander Sokurov has directed some of the most beautiful visual poems I've managed to see since the films of the late Andrei Tarkovsky. His 'Russian Ark' still ranks for one of the best films of post Soviet Russia. 'Alexandra' is a tale of an elderly woman who travels by train to see her grandson,who is a soldier fighting the Russian/Chechen war. Despite the potential for graphic,bloody war scenes, the film instead focuses on the sad faces of soldiers,as well as the Chechen peoples who were not involved directly in fighting the war (but still had sons or daughters who died in battle with Russian soldiers). This is the kind of screen poetry that could never be allowed to see the light of day in pre Glanost/Perestroika Russian cinema (Soviet censorship was astringent about subject matter). What I really appreciated was the film's photography (that makes every scene look arid & devoid of colour). It reminded me of Sokurov's film 'Mother & Son' at times (with the loving relationship of Grandmother & Grandson depicted on screen).

vlaisav A sublime ode to ordinary people in times of war; a cry, a silent scream for a drop of normal and decent life which was taken away with no particular reason. As the plot, deceptively uninteresting, is dragging towards the end of the film, this silent scream is raising in viewers throats, making you want to explode of anger, finding no answers of why are such things happen if the only thing you want is to live and let live! An excellent display of anti-war emotions, shown through long scenes of shattered and dusty life in a war zone. This film is not only about Chechnya and Russian - Chechen conflict. Every person who experienced grieves of war can find relief after such movie. Very nice peace of art!