I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Memorable, crazy movie

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Review: After the sad passing of Robin Williams, I thought that I would catch up in his older movies. I really enjoyed this film which shows a different side to his versatile acting style. This is a more serious side to his character, about a Russian who defects to New York after a trip to the big apple with the circus. There are a lot of political sides to the storyline which have a lot of similarities to everyday life in this day and age. Robin Williams put in a great performance, along with the other characters who make the movie realistic and quite funny in some parts. It's also a heart warming story which proves that determination and a little bit of guts can make you achieve your dreams. Enjoyable!Round-Up: After following Robin Williams career over the pass years, this is definitely a movie which shows that the man can really act. His Russian accent was brilliant and I liked the way that the black family took him in, regardless of his political views and his colour. The movie does look quite dated because it came out in 1984, but the storyline is timeless and I'm sure that everyone can relate to the many different situations which Williams character comes across. Anyway, it's definitely worth a watch, just to see Williams in a different light.Budget: $13million Worldwide Gross: $25millionI recommend this movie to people who are into there comedic dramas about a Russian defecting to America after travelling with the circus and visiting Bloomingdales. 5/10

Just found out about this movie and watched it as a result of the untimely death of Robbin Williams.I lived in the Soviet Union until I was 23, and I don't understand those reviewers saying that this movie accurately portrays life in the SU.First, the bus is totally un-SU, has those metal loops hanging from the horizontal metal bar handles, a typical American bus, not a Soviet bus, which is immediately obvious to the naked eye. This is minor, though.Nest, there are the toilet paper line scenes, which are totally lame. We would use napkins or newspaper as toilet paper in SU, but we didn't have the long lines do buy toilet paper as the movie claims to project.Then there's a reference to Russian women having a mustache, which is totally ridiculous. Another piece of retarded cold-war American propaganda. Anyone who's been to the SU or Russia knows that Russian women are 10, 20, no 100 times hotter than their American counterparts (over 50% of which are statistically obese to say the least). Not to mention American women's attitude that has resulted in American men being the #1 men by country to marry foreign women. Enough said.In general, each country, the SU and the US, had positives and negatives about living there. But life in the SU was superior after all (I left SU only after it broke up in 1991). People in the SU had far more of the one precious resource that Americans could only dream of having (and still do): TIME. People in the SU had a roof over their head, food, and other basic necessities of life, while at the same time having a ton of free time, including time to pursue their dreams and hobbies. That is why the arts (ballet, literature, etc.) were so developed in the SU compared to the US: people actually had time on their hands to pursue those interests and hobbies. The US was, and still is, a bunch of debt slaves that live thinking how to make enough money to pay the next set of their bills, and have no time for real life.Not to mention that American kids grew up (and do even more so now) inside, seeing nothing but virtual reality, playing computer games, etc., while we in the SU were free to play out in the street all day long without being worried about drugs, psychos, kidnappers, etc. At age 10, I could take a train to a different city to go to a market to buy parts for building a personal computer, for instance. Good luck doing that in the U.S. which doesn't even have a transportation system to this day. And I never heard about drugs until the SU broke up. Ultimately, no society is perfect, but a good part of this movie is just a bunch of cheap propaganda. Of course, some people would defect from the SU, but so did people from the States (look up Dean Reed, for instance).I liked the line "I have not had a job for 8 years. Welcome to the USA!" Sounds like things have not progressed much in the USA since 1984 when this movie was made....Anyway, travel the world, people, and draw your own conclusions before you buy the bullsh!t that your government feeds you. Goes the same for both Russia and the U.S., as well as any other country... If you think of watching this flick, opt for Goodwill Hunting instead, even if it would be a re-run for you.

Moscow on the Hudson is a fabulous example of a pretty-good movie chock full of 1980s artifacts like Jordache jeans, feathered hair-dos and Afro Sheen, that is often surprisingly interesting, sensitive and even occasionally profound -- especially on the level of the victory of the individual soul over totalitarianism, and the defense of American capitalism against Marxism.This film brings back a flood of cultural memories of the Eighties, the decade immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time in the United States when our political and cultural self-esteem matched our economic prosperity. It doesn't hurt that this movie stars a young bearded Robin Williams with heart (and Russian soul!) and a really cute and occasionally nude young Maria Conchita Alonso (a real-life Venezuelan immigrant) full of Italian passion and an ambitious independent spirit.Only in the early 1980s could blue jeans from Bloomies, velvety white toilet paper, supermarket coffee, studio apartments, hot-dog stands, cab-driving jobs, and U.S. citizenship ceremonies be portrayed as symbols -- indeed even weapons -- of democratic capitalism in a world still governed "from Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea" by the totalitarian evil against which President Ronald Reagan called a crusade two years earlier in his famous 1982 Evil Empire speech to the House of Commons.The political content of the movie is startlingly black-and-white by today's standards of multiculturalism and moral relativism when many academics defend dictatorships' "sovereign right" to exist, and so the offhand manner with which at every turn the film's writers Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos deliver praise to political liberty, capitalism and America's unique cultural acceptance of immigrants dedicated to the pursuit of happiness is remarkable. While the way in which their praises are conveyed may from time-to-time seem a little cheesy, sentimental or dated, their profound significance is not diminished.Exactly because capitalism is an economic system as well as a social system, Robin William's character is portrayed as a Russian seeking a remedy for his literal physical hunger and basic financial requirements of life that socialism fails to satisfy. His Russian friend, played wonderfully by Elya Baskin, suffers from socialism's other often dramatized evil -- its humiliating and paralyzing effect on an individual's creative mind and psychology. Perhaps it is precisely because the film's focus is on Williams' character that Moscow on the Hudson at times comes off as exhibiting the over-the-top 1980s commercialism that made it popular then and a little startling in today's Greener age.Russophiles can get a kick out of some of the Russia scenes. Highlights include the drab Moscow Circus on Tsvetnoi Boulevard including full-figured women in polyester; sour old babushkas enforcing their place in line; and shoe vendors pushing the wrong sizes. They might also find some treatment of Soviet atrocities like sending war protesters to mental institutions, or neighbors reporting dissidents to the KGB a bit trite, but not inaccurate. Such horrors are no less relevant in Putin's Russia of today (October 2006), where the most recent contract killing of independent politicians, businessmen and intellectuals is journalist Anna Politkovskaya.While I've focused on the political content, this movie is not primarily a political piece, but a love story; and not primarily a love story, but a romance of personal initiative -- of immigrants who choose to reject the oppressive circumstances they left behind and to seize the chance to pursue their material survival and eventually, individual happiness. The aims of the film are high, maybe even too high at times for this light film to be able to achieve fully; but it is definitely touching and fairly deals with the array of issues every immigrant faces on a variety of levels. I personally found the love relationship between Williams and Alonso to be touchingly realistic at times; and the individualistic focus of this film to be refreshing, as well as a shocking reminder of how inappropriately self-conscious the American media has become in publicly asserting the universal truth and appeal of its core principles: freedom and capitalism.

I'm guessing that when "Moscow on the Hudson" first came out, it looked kind of silly and unrealistic. But now that the Cold War has long since ended, it looks better (and watching the movie, you can see why the Soviet Union was imploding). Robin Williams, in one of his more easygoing roles, plays Russian saxophonist Vladimir Ivanoff, who defects while his group is performing in New York. The rest of the movie shows him trying to adjust to life in America, with varying degrees of success. Among his new acquaintances are Lucia Lombardo (Maria Conchita Alonso), Lionel Witherspoon (Cleavant Derricks) and Orlando Ramirez (Alejandro Rey, whom you may recall as Carlos on "The Flying Nun").All in all, this isn't really anything special, but it does almost seem to be a premonition of the Eastern Bloc collapsing. Worth seeing.