Kukushka

Made by a director-writer, Alexander Rogozhkin (Checkpoint), who is clearly an old-fashioned humanist, The Cuckoo features an excellent trio of actors playing protagonists, thrown together by war, who can‘t speak each other‘s language. Rogozhkin has a fine eye for both human behavior and natural vistas. Under his eye, the landscape becomes his fourth principal character. As in a classic 1950s American Western by Anthony Mann or John Ford, we see these characters and their onscreen fates as something tied to the land, their relationships enacted against, and vivified by, the timeless expanse of mountain and sky stretching behind them. (Michael Wilmington)