The best Sergei Dreiden’s comedy movies

Kind and lazy Jenya comes to Moscow from small village in Belarus for earnings. Criminal incident unexpectedly separates Jenya from companions and leaves him alone without money and documents. He has no friends or relatives in this big and hostile city and he is about to end as a homeless bum.

Nikolai (played by Sergei Dontsov) has been fired from his job as a music teacher and has to live in the gym until he finds a place to stay. Finally, he gets a communal room in the apartment of Gorokhov (Victor Mikhalkov). The room's previous inhabitant, an old lady, has died a year ago, and yet her cat, Maxi, is still in the locked room, healthy and fat. Soon, Nikolai and his neighbours discover the mystery: there is a window to Paris in the room. That's when the comedy begins - will the Russians be able to cope with the temptation to profit from the discovery?

Considering that Musakov’s Abdulladzhan (1991) was dedicated to Steven Spielberg, we might suggest that these four boys embody nothing more complicated than a conflict of youthful innocence with some ominous threat—the basic workings of E.T. (1982) or War of the Worlds (2005), say. That threat, however, is best understood not through vague nationalism or warmed-over socialism, but through the other reference-point of Abdulladzhan—Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1980). Musakov leaves his boys in a simplified radiance so bright and so overexposed that it no longer looks like the skies of sunny Tashkent, but a disturbing, borderless luminosity to match the flat tonal range of Stalker’s “Zone.” Our Uzbek boys are nowhere in particular; this is a broader domain than anything international.

The popular TV journalist Sergei Kupriyanov recently became the country's main television personality and began to make his own program. But success, money, and fame cannot fill the void in a marriage relationship. Sergei's wife Irina lacks his love and warmth, and Sergei himself is looking for novelty, which he finds in the arms of his charming colleague Lena when Irina leaves for St. Petersburg.

A story of a young girl Claudia who works as a security guard on a slowly dying metal plant.