Moscow on the Hudson (1984)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Review: After the sad passing of Robin Williams, I thought that I would catch up in his older movies. I really enjoyed this film which shows a different side to his versatile acting style. This is a more serious side to his character, about a Russian who defects to New York after a trip to the big apple with the circus. There are a lot of political sides to the storyline which have a lot of similarities to everyday life in this day and age. Robin Williams put in a great performance, along with the other characters who make the movie realistic and quite funny in some parts. It's also a heart warming story which proves that determination and a little bit of guts can make you achieve your dreams. Enjoyable!Round-Up: After following Robin Williams career over the pass years, this is definitely a movie which shows that the man can really act. His Russian accent was brilliant and I liked the way that the black family took him in, regardless of his political views and his colour. The movie does look quite dated because it came out in 1984, but the storyline is timeless and I'm sure that everyone can relate to the many different situations which Williams character comes across. Anyway, it's definitely worth a watch, just to see Williams in a different light.Budget: $13million Worldwide Gross: $25millionI recommend this movie to people who are into there comedic dramas about a Russian defecting to America after travelling with the circus and visiting Bloomingdales. 5/10

Manhattan looks so much more varied and gritty and real and less mall-ified than it does today in this, Paul Mazursky's 1984 love letter to the American way, and one of the last unambiguously patriotic mainstream American movies. (It's very much a product of its Reagan time, right down to the casual homophobia.) Robin Williams, for once not twinkling too hard or overworking his virtuosity or adorableness, is an Everyman Russian who unexpectedly defects in Bloomingdale's and goes on to live the immigrant experience, suffering urban indignities and romantic angst along the way. His worklife is a little easier, his economic situation a little less treacherous, and the people he meets a little nicer than they would be in real life. For all that, in its celebration of the melting pot and its warm embrace of the American urban landscape, the movie moved me to tears.

Moscow on the Hudson is a fabulous example of a pretty-good movie chock full of 1980s artifacts like Jordache jeans, feathered hair-dos and Afro Sheen, that is often surprisingly interesting, sensitive and even occasionally profound -- especially on the level of the victory of the individual soul over totalitarianism, and the defense of American capitalism against Marxism.This film brings back a flood of cultural memories of the Eighties, the decade immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time in the United States when our political and cultural self-esteem matched our economic prosperity. It doesn't hurt that this movie stars a young bearded Robin Williams with heart (and Russian soul!) and a really cute and occasionally nude young Maria Conchita Alonso (a real-life Venezuelan immigrant) full of Italian passion and an ambitious independent spirit.Only in the early 1980s could blue jeans from Bloomies, velvety white toilet paper, supermarket coffee, studio apartments, hot-dog stands, cab-driving jobs, and U.S. citizenship ceremonies be portrayed as symbols -- indeed even weapons -- of democratic capitalism in a world still governed "from Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea" by the totalitarian evil against which President Ronald Reagan called a crusade two years earlier in his famous 1982 Evil Empire speech to the House of Commons.The political content of the movie is startlingly black-and-white by today's standards of multiculturalism and moral relativism when many academics defend dictatorships' "sovereign right" to exist, and so the offhand manner with which at every turn the film's writers Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos deliver praise to political liberty, capitalism and America's unique cultural acceptance of immigrants dedicated to the pursuit of happiness is remarkable. While the way in which their praises are conveyed may from time-to-time seem a little cheesy, sentimental or dated, their profound significance is not diminished.Exactly because capitalism is an economic system as well as a social system, Robin William's character is portrayed as a Russian seeking a remedy for his literal physical hunger and basic financial requirements of life that socialism fails to satisfy. His Russian friend, played wonderfully by Elya Baskin, suffers from socialism's other often dramatized evil -- its humiliating and paralyzing effect on an individual's creative mind and psychology. Perhaps it is precisely because the film's focus is on Williams' character that Moscow on the Hudson at times comes off as exhibiting the over-the-top 1980s commercialism that made it popular then and a little startling in today's Greener age.Russophiles can get a kick out of some of the Russia scenes. Highlights include the drab Moscow Circus on Tsvetnoi Boulevard including full-figured women in polyester; sour old babushkas enforcing their place in line; and shoe vendors pushing the wrong sizes. They might also find some treatment of Soviet atrocities like sending war protesters to mental institutions, or neighbors reporting dissidents to the KGB a bit trite, but not inaccurate. Such horrors are no less relevant in Putin's Russia of today (October 2006), where the most recent contract killing of independent politicians, businessmen and intellectuals is journalist Anna Politkovskaya.While I've focused on the political content, this movie is not primarily a political piece, but a love story; and not primarily a love story, but a romance of personal initiative -- of immigrants who choose to reject the oppressive circumstances they left behind and to seize the chance to pursue their material survival and eventually, individual happiness. The aims of the film are high, maybe even too high at times for this light film to be able to achieve fully; but it is definitely touching and fairly deals with the array of issues every immigrant faces on a variety of levels. I personally found the love relationship between Williams and Alonso to be touchingly realistic at times; and the individualistic focus of this film to be refreshing, as well as a shocking reminder of how inappropriately self-conscious the American media has become in publicly asserting the universal truth and appeal of its core principles: freedom and capitalism.

I saw this movie when it first came out, and I never want to see it again. >From my recollection, Williams' Russian character never adapts to his new home in NYC. Brief comic moments cannot outweigh this movie's constant oppressive atmosphere of a man who made a really bad life choice. Ever notice when a great comedian tries to play a serious role, it's usually maudlin and depressing? Somehow this movie reminds me of a Three Stooges short which is also very depressing. It's called "Cash And Carry". The stooges, seeking shelter, find a shack in the middle of a junkyard, where they find empty tin cans, which they chuck out onto a huge pile of more empty cans. The shack's original occupant arrives - a young boy on crutches. And now the boy has no money, because his savings were hidden in an empty tin can. What a laugh riot (sarcasm).