Leviathan 2014

     Kolya and his wife Lilya live with their teenage son Romka in a small coastal fishing town by the Barents Sea in Northern Russia.  Sometimes whales come into the bay.  Vadim is the corrupt mayor of the town and he is trying to buy this small but desirable piece of waterfront property out from under them for the use of the city.  They have land, a house and a small auto repair shop.  The city has offered a purchase price including the income generated by the repair shop.  Kolya and Lilya have gone to the city several times to try to stop the buyout.  Dmitriy is a powerful attorney in Moscow and he is an old Army friend of Kolya.  The mayor gets a surprise when Dmitriy pays him a visit and shows him a folder of information they have about his illegal practices. 

     This is a difficult movie to get into with the length, subtitles and the many complications of the case.  The scenery in this area is very beautiful with massive rock formations leading down to the sea.  There are many abandoned and barely there ships along the shoreline.  Further into the film there is the bleached white skeleton of a leviathan.  I wonder how anyone in Russia can accomplish any work with all the copious vodka drinking depicted in this movie.  3* (This movie is OK)
 

140 min, Drama directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev with Aleksey Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, Roman Madyanov, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Anna Ukolova, Aleksey Rozin, Sergey Pokodaev, Platon Kamenev, Sergey Bachurskiy.

Note:  Imdb 7.7 out of 10, 99% critic 79% audience on Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert 3 ½*.

Special Note:  Filmed in Kirovsk, Monchegorsk, Teriberka, Apatity, Murmansk Oblast, Russia.