Brother

Russian noir comes of age with Alexei Balabanov's Brother, a tough, taut, expertly made gangster movie about a baby-faced former soldier boy from the countryside (Sergei Bodrov Jr.) who takes today's St. Petersburg by storm, creating a trail of dead Chechen thugs and blown-away local mafia before hitchhiking by truck to his future destination. Where next? "Moscow!" he says with a crooked smile.

Director Balabanov is brilliant at getting at the cruel, chaotic, anything-goes Yeltsin-era Russia. Still, the movie belongs to Bodrov, who previously played the nice young soldier in Prisoner of the Mountains (which was made by his father, Sergei Bodrov Sr.). In real life, the younger Bodrov is a youthful academic with a master's degree in Italian art history from Moscow University. On screen here, he's a primal throwback to Cagney in The Public Enemy and Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar, a charismatic killer with a wan smile, a goofy, junior-high-bully's voice, a dim intelligence, and a disquieting sweetness, which can appear on display just moments after he's saturated a seedy enemy with hot bullets. He murders and then he listens lovingly to his Sony Walkman: there's a great score throughout of throbbing Russian devil rock! At the Coolidge Corner.

-- Gerald Peary