Russian Ark

Acclaimed Russian director Alexander Sokurov's surprisingly accessible film is both a grand tour through 300 hundred years of Russian cultural identity and a stunning technical achievement: The entire 96-minute film consists of a single, unedited Steadicam shot. The setting is St. Petersburg's Hermitage museum, once the Winter Palace of Peter the Great, later a museum under Catherine the Great and forever the jewel of Russian culture. It's also a repository of some of Europe's greatest masterpieces, and can be read as a symbol of the cultural conflict at the heart of Russian identity. Our unseen narrator (voiced by Sokurov himself) awakens after some sort of accident...