Alexei Gherman's first film since My Friend Ivan Lapshin is a towering achievement. The time is the winter of 1953, the place, Moscow; anti-Semitic purges are under way and Stalin is dying. There are signs that something is astir both in the country at large and in the household of General Yuri Glinsky, a military surgeon. Glinsky is abducted and, after a harrowing journey, deposited at the heart of the enigma. An odd mixture of exhaustion, giddiness, and confusion permeates Gherman's lustrous images, an eye-opening representation of what it's like to live in a totalitarian society where something monumental is taking place, although no one knows precisely what, nor when or how it will break.-Kent Jones