Leningrad (2009)

Nice effects though.

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

To say this movie has no idea what it's doing is an understatement. This film is baffling. I understand it's not a Hollywood movie. I understand it's not bound by those norms. But by god. This movie jumps around more than my most unstable relationship. At no point did I realize who the main characters were, what anyone's goals were, who we were supposed to be rooting for and why this movie was so shoddy! I mean, start at bad audio dubbing, finish with the most random cuts happening every two seconds! I'm not joking this movie gets laughable. 1.5 million people died. How do you make that funny. I'll tell you how, you have: -obvious stage lights -horrific acting and accents -no sort of consideration or placement of scenes -bad dubbing -no build up -no plot or theme focus -ridiculous scenes, such as one where what we think (we don't know) is the main character walking after someone in despair, and they literally just walk into a mound of ice and pretend to trip... Oh and the siege of Leningrad, yeah that's about 30 people who slowly run towards each other.And, the only reason we know this famine is getting worse is because we see the town's announcer every few minutes and every time we see him he's coughing a little more and he's wearing an extra item of clothing!OK, so maybe it did get the costumes and the sets right, sure, but that's the thing! Most people will just give this movie a pass because its set in World War Two! It's just a bit insulting that some Russian filmmakers will go and try their hand at history and a Hollywood war movie now they've got a budget and just fail so badly filmmaking-wise!Please, if you watch this don't expect it to be some interesting foreign period piece.

If you saw the horrible film,"Stalingrad", well try and watch this film, it is worse! Far worse, although the battle scenes were historically more accurate and not continuous. Plus authentic looking mechanized Wehrmacht armor was close to authentic. And 5 Russians do not defeat Paulus's 6'th army alone. This film hauls in 1/64'th a star. Horrible, again I wanted to grab the AR-15 an shoot the TV to put the television out of it's misery for having to play this stinker! A bomb, not air dropped, a box office bomb it is. If you watch it don't say I warned you!

The siege of Leningrad is a such a significant part of WWII History that it deserves a good film. There haven't been enough Western movies made about the suffering of the Russians in WWII. We all know "Enemy at the Gates" which is a thriller action war movie that deals with heroic soldiers but not the suffering of the people.This turned out to be an example of a movie that could have done with a Hollywood touch to tighten the script and bring a story into focus with interesting characters. The story doesn't flow properly. Mira Sorvino and Gabriel Byrne both seem like fish out of water here.The photography of the city is so limited. They couldn't even manage some arial shots of the city and its landmarks to give an on location feel.The English dubbing of the characters is terrible with everyone sounding alike.Don't bother with this movie. It's terrible.

A very bad film, an amalgam of clichés and historical inaccuracies. A few examples: in an early scene Soviet infantry are attacked by the Germans; instead of staying in their trenches to shoot at them, they advance into open ground to fight them,contrary to all infantry tactics; Kate, one of the central characters, is supposedly the daughter of a White Russian and obsessed with her Russianness, yet she does not speak Russian; a guilt-stricken German airman attacks an anti-aircraft gun- the gun, however, does not fire shrapnel shells but scores a direct hit on his 'plane, which doesn't look much like a German 'plane of WWII. In fairness, when they could escape the preposterous plot and the consequent absurdities there are some genuinely powerful moments- the depiction of people slowly starving to death is convincingly done and moving, but these only show up the rest of it even more. A film to be avoided.