Cruel Illness of Men (1989)

Contemporary Russia. After he flubs a penalty kick, a humiliated national soccer player quits the game. He flees to a small town, where he decides to coach their local team.

While serving life in prison, a young man looks back at the people, the circumstances and the system that set him on the path toward his crime.

In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.

Russ Millings has just been released from prison after serving 21 years for a 3rd strike conviction for possessing an ounce of marijuana. As he tries to adapt to a world he doesn’t recognize – including trying to learn how to use the internet – he finds an abandoned baby in a dumpster behind the fast food restaurant where he works as a dishwasher. Unsure of what to do, and caught between impulses of kindness and panic, Russ soon realizes this could be his chance at redemption.

On a summer day in late 19th century Russia, a group of bourgeois friends and acquaintances gather at a dilapidated country estate.

A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.

Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.

Russian provincial town in the middle of the 1930s Stalin's Great Purge. Ivan Lapshin, the head of the local police, does what he has to do. And he does it well.

Georgy is driving a load of freight into Russia when, after an unpleasant encounter with the police at a border crossing, he finds himself giving a lift to a strange old man with disturbing stories about his younger days in the Army. After next picking up a young woman who works as a prostitute and is wary of the territory, Georgy finds himself lost, and despite asking some homeless men for help, he’s less sure than he was before of how to make his way back where he belongs. As brutal images of violence and alienation cross the screen, Georgy’s odyssey becomes darker and more desperate until it reaches an unexpected conclusion.

Shortly before the outbreak of WWI, a peasant from rural Russia arrives in St. Petersburg to find work.