IslandGuru Who payed the critics

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

leplatypus The LeCarré novel is among the best cold war book ever written because it has everything: a wonderful romance, an acid but true analysis of international relations...This movie adaptation is a real winner because it pushes the audio and visual elements to high levels: the cast is wonderful between old, grumpy Connery, cute Pfeiffer and cool British / excited, falcons American players... Goldsmith score is romantic as well as thrilling and wraps the scenes like a glove! And for sure, the real Russian locations are a must and give us the perfect feeling of what USSR was about!So for me, this is a perfect movie, even if two things have always bother me: the casting of Brandaeur: since i saw him playing the lecherous in the Colette movie, i just can't stand him! Next the jazz score is a poor choice for a movie played between Lisbona, London and Moscow…At last, a bit like this movie/novel who deals about finding the golden goose, i was sure that LC was an amazing writer: his next novel (Our game) was as good but all the others i try to read it was just horrible, thus my title ...

Robert J. Maxwell Sean Connery is a publisher and saxophone player swept up in Cold War antics as an agent trying to smuggle scientific secrets of some sort out of Russia and into the West.I never liked the soprano saxophone. I don't know why it exists. It's usually too shrill and is associated with supermarkets, cheap commercials, and Kenny G. Why isn't the clarinet good enough, hey? This is one sluggish movie and a bit complicated, as the author's plots tend to be. It's redeemed by the shenanigans of the CIA/MI5 or MI6, a group of puppeteers behind Connery and his contact, Michelle Pfeiffer, led by a hot-headed Roy Scheider and a dry, ironic James Fox. J. T. Walsh -- my co-star in the superlative "Windmills of the Gods", or what it "Rage of Angels?", I forget -- is the ironbound US Army officer who suspects everyone of being a ComSymp and wants to bomb them all -- "a hard-head from the ***hole up," as someone describes him.They put Connery through a lie detector test to make sure he's not a commie, and the scene puts on display the movie's most charming feature -- its witty screenplay.The wily interrogators ask Connery about his politics, his motives, his past. "Have you ever associated with any musicians with known anarchist tendencies?" Connery frowns thoughtfully. "Well, there was one trombone player. Willie Brown was his name. He was the only musician I've ever known who was completely devoid of any anarchist tendencies." The performances are uniformly good, even Roy Scheider who seems about to stroke out at any moment and who shouts scatological imprecations. I think the role calls for it. I can't understand why all the men are so awfully sun tanned though. The weather in Moscow and St. Petersberg are about what we can expect -- more clouds of gray than any Russian play could guarantee.The photography of Russian cities and their monuments is memorable.

FloodClearwater John Le Carre stories are subtle, tissuey things. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy requires re-reading the book, and rewinding in mid-film, to catch key plot developments. The Russia House is, in this vein, a classic Le Carre yarn, co- adapted to the screen by Le Carre and the talented Tom Stoppard. The film is produced and directed by Australian filmmaker Fred Schipisi, notable for the excellent and psychodynamic Six Degrees of Separation and the fulsomely enjoyable Roxanne. Schipisi's direction and production values are this film's weakest points, the framed shots from the start look amateurishly ungainly, ill-framed, and ill-cut. The director's only saving perhaps was the decision to allow jazz man Branford Marsalis to score the film, with mostly lilting haunts of soprano sax melodies. The story centers on a Brit, played by Sean Connery, and a Russian, played by Michele Pfeiffer. It is 1990, and glasnost has been declared. Connery's leading man, "Barley" Blair, is a Russophilic book editor fond of extended stays in grey Moscow. Pfeiffer's co-lead, Katya, is a Russian of almost anonymous identity beyond the familiar tropes. Katya has a friend who programs Russia's nukes, the friend wants Russia's secrets out, and Katya is recruited to vouchsafe them as written down to Barley, this westerner with a kind soul and an avowed commitment to humanism. Let's start with the biggest and best part of the film, Connery. His Barley is a glorious, ruined shambles. A gentle, aging hedonist, who looks, stealing a line from the film "like an unmade bed with a shopping bag attached." Connery is entertaining and engaging in every frame, truly inhabiting Barley as an original character.Pfeiffer is very good, if not at her best as the Russian woman beholden by secrets and restrained by crippling caution. Her Russian-tinted accent is querulous in the first minutes of the film, but by the midpoint she achieves--and she may do it with her cheekbones as much as her diction, it all counts--believability as a Russian person. The other great strength The Russia House has, which has sustained the film as watchable and re-watchable over time, is the large supporting cast of male actors portraying the MI6 and CIA spooks who Barley haphazardly encounters, and very quickly takes direction from. James Fox, Roy Scheider, John Mahoney, Michael Kitchen and an almost SNL-flamboyant Ian McNeice (as the riotously out-of-place Merrydew) provide a fantastical espionage-ical Greek chorus that set off Connery's ethical and emotional contretemps.The film's final potent ingredient is a solo supporting performance by Klaus Maria Brandauer as "(code name) Dante," a mysterious Russian who seems to be behind the searching questions the men in grey directing Barley seem to have. The Russia House is neither the best wrought Le Carre story on film, nor the best "Russia film" depicting the second cold war era of the 1980s. It would take a quick undercard to The Hunt for Red October. It would lose in a close decision to Gorky Park. But Connery as Barley above all is worth the ticket, which leaves the film in the category of "worthy," even with the producer/director's foibles set against it.

Michael Neumann Sean Connery further undermines his James Bond image by portraying, with obvious irony, a grubby amateur spy exploited by British Intelligence to obtain top secret information from somewhere inside the Kremlin. It's a far cry from Ian Fleming, presenting a serious, more credible espionage caper and suggesting that underneath the cosmetic reforms of glasnost the same invisible wheels continue turning (and for spy writers like John Le Carré, they had better be). The game of bluff and counter-bluff will be familiar to any fan of cloak-and-dagger fiction (the true villains, not surprisingly, are the gray-suited puppet-masters of the SIS and CIA), but all the clichés of the genre are at least brought together with a craftsmanship rare in Hollywood at the time. Director Fred Schepisi takes advantage of the Russian locations by making the film into something of a wide-screen travelogue, but the absurd, happily-ever-after epilogue is out of place: it looks like an imposed afterthought, and certainly can't match the more thoughtful ambivalence of the book's final pages.