5 Russian comedy films with English Subtitles you MUST see

It is a 2012 Russian black comedy-drama film directed by Roman Prygunov and based on the novel Soulless: Tale of an Unreal Man by Sergey Minaev. It was selected as the opening film of the 34th Moscow International Film Festival.

The film is about a successful young top manager Max Andreev who’s used to spending extortionate amount of cash on luxury cars, women and night clubs. He’s everything a man ever wanted to be and to possess. His life is a dream-come-true. But one day Max meets a 19-year-old girl named Yulia, a lower-middle-class university student, who has a “McJob” for a living, and who occasionally participates in various social activism groups of Moscow. Realizing that he wasted 10 years of his life away, Max decides to befriend Yulia, and together they live through numerous peripeteias, shaking and changing both of their lives for the better.

Another great Russian comedy made in 2000. There’re other versions like “Peculiarities of the National Fishing” or “Peculiarities of the National hunt”. All are equally worth watching.

The story goes like this: Kuzmich and Semyonov feel bored at the 13th cordon until the season of “checks” and “inspections” begins. The first inspectors are from the Ministry of Forestry, followed by two more from the environmental department. The heroes even have to drink tea for a while since the environmental leader is a teetotal lady who also hates hunting. Later, Leva Soloveichik and General Ivolgin join the company. As always the company survives a lot of absurd but completely legitimate adventures. The philosophical story-parable compiled by Kuzmich about the Chinese hunter Hu Zhou who comprehends all the secrets of Russian hunting and tries to understand the Russian soul, is carried throughout the storyline.

It’s a 2010 Russian comedy film directed by Timur Bekmambetov. The film takes place in 11 different cities in Russia and tells the story of a series of different characters whose acquaintance is purely coincidental. The characters find themselves in difficult situations which they can only escape if they find help, by miracle or through six degrees of separation. According to this theory all the people on Earth are connected through six handshakes. The characters in the film are a student, a thief and his connections with the policeman who caught him, a taxi driver in love with a famous pop singer, a businessman rushing to his beloved, two snowboarders.

It’s a feel-good movie for a relaxing evening in.

This is a truly hilarious comedy similar to the British crime-comedy “Snatch” by Guy Ritchie. Director Aleksei Balabanov, who directed Brother and Brother 2, uses Russia’s most prominent actors. The film suggests that in the mean free-market streets of Russia in the beginning of 90s, the only real liberty was the freedom to kill.

The film opens with a professor lecturing a group of university students about the primitive accumulation of capital. The professor says: “Start-up capital is how everything begins – it makes it possible to start a business and multiply the initial investment many times over. The key question is how to get start-up capital…” By way of example, she begins to tell a story that supposedly took place a decade earlier during the socio-economic tumult in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The subtitles in this film are auto-generated, so not the best quality. It would definitely help if you knew some Russian.