Rating: 
Summary: Atmospheric, "heavy" story of tragic dependence
Review: Seen through the eyes of the little Sanya, the movie incorporates many common and stereotypical experiences about the life during Stalinism and the Soviet era in general(communal apartments, brutality of everyday life, lack of control over one's life, abortions=birth control). A feeling of hopelessness pervades the movie as Sanya and his "parents" must sneak onto yet another train carrying them away to yet another and another city of the vast Soviet empire. The tragedy of Sanya's mother, who is pushed to a physically and emotionally ruinous dependence upon the Thief is also typical. Her story echoes the main tragedy at the heart of the movie--the tragedy of every person's life during these times, the repression of individuality, the desperation of knowing that one's life is worth close to nothing and might be instantly crushed at any moment...the dehumanization of society and the suffocation of the spirit...Aside from its obvious meaning, the title of the movie also points to a thief with a capital "T"...the one who stole the humanity and personal freedom from hundreds of millions of Russians during that era.
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Summary: Forget the Kleenex, get a towel
Review: The allegory in this film of a Stalin/USSR that the child Sanja must defeat went right over my head. So if you're looking for a deep analysis of the directors' subliminal intentions, I can't help you there. But I can tell you that "The Thief" struck me as the most poignant human drama I've seen since "Gallipolli". Briefly, a soldier's widow with a young son is won over by Tolya, a striking figure in a Red Army uniform which indeed does gaurd a tattoo of Stalin. Once the widow has learned of Tolya's habitual theft, along with his lack of remorse and empathy for others, she is already caught in his romantic spell. And Sanja, at first terrified of this new man in the family, gradually trusts him more and more. Especially for the innocent child, portrayed in awestruck wonder by Misha Philipchuk, this set-up bodes heartbreak. And the film does not disappoint in that expectation. This is well visualized when an older Sanja, alone and desperate to find Tolya, stares in disbelief as the latter, finally found, doesn't recognize him and ridicules his salutation of "Daddy"...the very nickname the con-artist had insisted on during their days together. The most innocent and trusting in this film are prey to those whose only desire is to please themselves....and to use the innocents for that purpose. But except for the child, the "innocent" are not blameless in the scenarios that ensue. Sanja's mother,Katje, sees many signs throughout first scenes of Tolya's true character, in his gruffness and cruelty to others, but she stays with him nonetheless, even to the point of jeapordizing her own life. The device of using a child's eyes as a window to this tragedy works well in this film, emphasizing the difference between the imagined, idolized Tolyan and the real one: not only in his eyes, but in everyone's. I thoroughly enjoyed the film, although I did use a lot of Kleenex. DVD Extras: trailer for film, subtitles in French, English & Spanish, scene breakdown.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful portrait of a land, a nation and a family
Review: The Thief is a story of a young boy who learns his lessons in manhood from a tough stepfather with a Stalin tatoo, a supposed military man who is really a thief. The three principal characters, the mother, stepfather, and son, are very convincingly played. The scenes of life in Russia in the 1950s, from the communual apartments to the bleak landscapes, are magnificent. And the story of this boy's life is compelling. It's tragic in the classic Russian tradition, but a mesmerizing story and a nice example of quality modern Russian filmmaking.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful portrait of a land, a nation and a family
Review: The Thief is a story of a young boy who learns his lessons in manhood from a tough stepfather with a Stalin tatoo, a supposed military man who is really a thief. The three principal characters, the mother, stepfather, and son, are very convincingly played. The scenes of life in Russia in the 1950s, from the communual apartments to the bleak landscapes, are magnificent. And the story of this boy's life is compelling. It's tragic in the classic Russian tradition, but a mesmerizing story and a nice example of quality modern Russian filmmaking.
Rating:
Summary: Russian Poetry
Review: The Thief is a very beautiful movie. It is very romantic, genuine, never vulgar. Photography is superb, acting is good, the story is moving. A very true and rather unusual performance: such a movie could only have been made by a Russian, or maybe an Italian (think Cinema Paradiso), but definitely not in Hollywood, which makes it interesting to some, and unappealing to others. A great movie which deserves more attention than it actually received. The European VHS version is preferable to this one, though: for the US the end has been cut, which really takes away a lot of the drama. What a shame.
Rating:
Summary: A timely look at family distortion
Review: The Thief was a grammy award nominee in 1999 for best foreign film. It's Russian (with subtitles) and takes as its subject a little boy in post WWII Soviet Russia who's father is killed in the war. His mother is befriended by another soldier and the movie traces the development of the new family. I use the term family very loosely, for reasons that'll be quite clear when you see the movie, as I hope you will. The relationships are explored with remarkable candor and at times graphic realism. I can easily see why it was nominated for best picture. Both of the adult characters are tragic figures in the classic sense - strangely dignified but doomed to suffer for the singular flaw in their personality. What really makes the movie so moving - and so modern - is that the tragedy of the two grown-ups is deflected onto the pitiful little boy, who comes off as both hapless victim and tenacious survivor. Though set in the dismally impoverished outskirts of Stalinist Russia, it has particular relevance today, since it explores with great depth and understanding the fragile and demanding constitution of young children and the dangers of social instability when children are involved. (When you see the movie, think back to the recent shooting in Michigan and the social circumstances surrounding the little boy involved there, and you'll get an haunting sense for just how timely the movie is.) It easily merits an enthusiastic recommendation from me.
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Summary: We had forgotten just how much a Chukhrai film was needed.
Review: The title character in this film poses as an officer in the Soviet army, shortly after World War II. He settles into rooms in big communal apartments in cities; the residents see his uniform and assume he is a war hero, and the landlords have too much sympathy and respect for him to ask him for his papers. One day, he gets all the residents of the apartment tickets to some show, steals everything he can once they leave, and runs off to another city to repeat the process. With him goes a young woman who hopelessly fell for him one day on a train, some time after giving birth to her son alone in a field somewhere. The son accompanies her; we learn that his father never returned from the war. That is the very simple story of Pavel Chukhrai's "The Thief." It's also a remarkably powerful story, in many respects. Consider, first, the woman, who absurdly follows the thief across the country, even so far as to try to bribe the officials with her pitiful valuables when the thief is finally caught, even so far as Siberia, where he is eventually sent after that and where she dies of a botched abortion soon after. Consider the opening scene, in the field, where Chukhrai uses close-up shots of her face and hands to show a titanic fortitude, later contrasted with her apparent lack of will. But "lack of will" is emphatically _not_ the right term, since the thief does not really force her to stay with him or scare her into staying. Rather, she _wills herself_ to follow the thief and die in the middle of nowhere. That peculiar strength is shown again in her last lines, when she tells her son why she is in the hospital. Where someone else would have been terrified at similar prospects, she explains with devastating understatement, "Oh, it's nothing, just women's problems." Consider, second, her son, who grows up both hating and loving the thief, and even calls him "Father" by the end despite long having refused to do so. But he also remembers that he once had a real father, and he sees vague images of him in a soldier's overcoat, blurry, because he does not really remember his face. That image is to him everything the thief is not - straightforward honour - but unlike the thief, it is powerless to do a thing to help him. The minimal narration (by the adult Sanya, we understand) adds another dimension of elegy to the proceedings by making them memories rather than immediate events. And, of course, there's the scene with Sanya's tattoos, where we realize that only with the thief's worldview can he get through life, though only without it can he really save himself. Supposedly, the "real" ending of the film features a grown-up Sanya in a modern war, looking for the thief on a battlefield. I think the film is actually better without it - staying entirely in the past gives it more thematic unity, and the scene with Sanya's tattoos is far more effective at showing what he became, anyway. Consider, lastly, the thief. It would have been easier than easy for Chukhrai to have made him a uniformly bad person; that would have effortlessly justified Sanya's hatred of him and turned Sanya's mother into a helpless victim. But that is not what he is. He is willing to defend them; he even gets into a fight with a man over Sanya once, when any normal father at the time would have just taken it out on the boy. The thief has no compunctions about also using his fists in his domestic circle, but he is not generally abusive; doubtless many husbands and fathers of that time were far worse. He teaches Sanya a mindset which is destructive but really does help him take life on his own terms. And, when Sanya's mother threatens to leave, instead of just abandoning her, he gives her all the valuables he has on him. That's not to say he loves them, since love is more or less foreign to him, and he uses them to the extent of making the boy help him in his thieving enterprises, but there is more to him than that, and there are things for which Sanya owes him. Some people like to interpret the thief as some kind of symbol of Stalin, especially since the thief has a tattoo of Stalin's face on his body. I don't think this is the case; convicts in that time were known to sometimes joke about Stalin being their father, and to the boy, that's a statement of the thief's strength rather than of his "rightness," since he doesn't seem to believe that the thief's victims are really enemies of the state. Pavel Chukhrai is the son of Grigoriy Chukhrai, the great Soviet director who made "Ballad of a Soldier," surely one of the highest triumphs of film. Though hindsight given by the past fifteen-odd years' worth of events has made his worldview darker than his father's, he has inherited all of the elder Chukhrai's simplicity, directness and compassion. "The Thief" is in every regard a Chukhrai film; that is, it is a powerful, emotional, and very human film.
Rating:
Summary: Story of one Sanya out of millions, scarred by Stalinism..
Review: There were so many "Sanyas" in Stalinist era, that their story simply have to told. The director did a good job, telling it. I did not know that this film was cut in America. I watched it as part of the Intl. Film Festival, and I am quite surprised to hear that... That must have taken away the very point of the film right out of it! For an unprepared viewer the ending would have been very important here. But, even with some cuts, this film is well-worth watching. It is tragic and dark, just like the times it portrays. It is about father-son relationship, but it is also about Stalinism and what it did to this type of relationship, among many others. Actors are very good, especially the boy, who played Sanya and brilliant, as always, Vladimir Mashkov (Tolyan). This film should be viewed along side the stories of Holocaust, in my opinion, because the damage of Stalinism was of no lesser value than Hitler's actions during WWII.
Rating: 
Summary: One of my all-time favorites
Review: This movie is one of my all-time favorites. However, I must say that the last very important scene was deleted in this version of the movie compared to the original Russian version. It is unfortunate since that scene changes the whole moral of the story.
Rating:
Summary: Touching, dramatic, and tragic. Typical Russian embodiment.
Review: This movie is wonderful. Despite the language barrier, The Thief presents a taste of Russian life to the world. Nominated for an Academy Award and so deserving, this movie will move you, and force you to sympathize with the main character-young Sonya. The story of a young boy growing up in post-war Russia, delivers the authentic lifestyle of a struggling lower-class family thrust into a conglameration of lies, deciet, and an overpowering government. Must see for movie lovers!
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