The Brothers Karamazov

The story of the Karamazov family in a Russian province at the end of the nineteenth century. The relations between the father and his three sons are tangled in every direction: money, women, faith and anger all sit at the same table. The father is killed and one of the sons is accused. His brothers cannot help him; the only person who stays beside him to the end is a woman who loves him. Ivan Pyryev died before he could finish shooting and the production was completed by two of its leads, Kirill Lavrov and Mikhail Ulyanov; all three are credited as directors. Adapted from Dostoevsky's novel, the film runs over three and a half hours and does not skip the novel's philosophical arguments. The telling reduces nobody to a single word. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film.