Brother 2

After the end of the first film, Danila Bagrov is living in Moscow. When the brother of an army friend is cheated in a deal involving a hockey player in America and killed, Danila goes to Chicago to settle it, taking his older brother Viktor with him. The subject is not revenge but how Russia looked at America in the nineties. What Danila says there is the most quoted and most argued-over part of the film; the lines became cult in the country, and their nationalist tone has been criticised ever since. The form is bigger and more populist than the first film: rock tracks, city panoramas, brisk cutting. Balabanov assembled the soundtrack from the Russian rock bands of the moment, and the film did a great deal to lodge that music in a generation's memory. It is among the last major works of Sergei Bodrov Jr., who was killed in 2002 in a glacial landslide during a shoot in North Ossetia; in Russia the figure continues to be treated as the emblem of a generation. Viktor Sukhorukov plays the older brother. Who it is for: viewers curious about Russian popular cinema and the cultural climate of the nineties. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by its politics; the narrative describes America and some ethnic groups crudely and does not correct itself.