JayPatton88 If you saw the horrible film,"Stalingrad", well try and watch this film, it is worse! Far worse, although the battle scenes were historically more accurate and not continuous. Plus authentic looking mechanized Wehrmacht armor was close to authentic. And 5 Russians do not defeat Paulus's 6'th army alone. This film hauls in 1/64'th a star. Horrible, again I wanted to grab the AR-15 an shoot the TV to put the television out of it's misery for having to play this stinker! A bomb, not air dropped, a box office bomb it is. If you watch it don't say I warned you!

elcoat I have not yet seen the film, but as a World War 2 historian just the previews hit pretty hard ... the scene dramatizing the historical photos of people pulling sleighs with little bodies on them, for example ... and I shall try to find a copy around Oslo to watch, to complete this.The reviewer who expressed doubt the Russians would mount an unsupported infantry attack across open ground is wrong. In the first years of the war, many Russian lives were wasted in such desperate attacks, often forced at gunpoint by NKVD political commissars.Defense Minister Voroshilov - one of only two of five prewar Red Army marshals to survive the NKVD purges of the Red Army ordered by Stalin - had been sent to Leningrad to personally defend it, and he personally led one of these desperate counterattacks.I will be interested to see if there are any sequences of K(limenti)V(oroshilov) tanks rolling out of the Kirov tank works and directly into battle? On my CoatneyHistory webpage, I have a free little boardgame titled Leningrad 1941: the Embattled City, about the early Wehrmacht onslaught (until the Germans shifted panzer and infantry forces to the attack on Moscow), with a dedication to its people.The theme of my webpages is "The more we learn about the Second World War, the better our chances it will be the LAST world war." We NEVER want another one, and this film looks like it inescapably shows how the innocent - especially children - suffer most.By the way, the pretty Russian actress who played Natalia in Sergey Bondarshuk's epic 1966 War and Peace film, Lyudmila Saveleva, was born in Leningrad on 24 January 1942, during the worst of the siege and starvation.Lou Coatney

ExoticaCat This movie has wasted it's title "Leningrad".Very disappointing movie, can't compare to German movie Stalingrad (1993) I had high hope for this movie. After I've watched Stalingrad (1993), I think it would be very interesting to check out the similar warfare from Russians' perspective, but I was utterly disappointed, so bad that I have to fast-forward some scenes to get by (almost quite in the middle of it).First all, if you want to see the fierce battle scene, then you can avoid this movie altogether, because it only lasts 5 minutes in the beginning. When the bomb does fall, some scene just so lack of common sense it is ridiculous - at the scene when the British journalist encounters an air raid, the bomb just falling off around her, I highly doubt that's what German pilots would do, waste tons of bomb on one person one truck.Second, I am all support to view the war from a different angle - city dwellers instead of soldiers at the killing field. But this movie's plot line is illogical, loss, jumping all over the places, from a conscience-stricken German pilot to the persecution of any reminder White Army relatives, from the special treatment to foreign journalists and Russian's own elite societies to the bonding of the two female characters... It's severely weakened the grim, bleak, desperate and crude suffering atmosphere when a city was under siege for 882 days with 1.5 million people perished.Third, when the plot line is scattered, script is weak, the one last thing can save the movie from a total disaster is the acting, however, it fails miserably here too! I like actor Gabriel Byrne a lot, but see him in this movie make me wondering what he was thinking? The Russian woman solider is way over the top annoying, she seems can be anywhere, do anything with full energy while others were at the verge of starving to death hanging on their finger nails. The English journalist is even more plain and phony. None the characters is likable, well acted, be able to command the screen and memorable.I like this movie just for the cinematographic which convincingly presents the destructed city and it's suffering people.And finally, I do have my utter respect to Russian people who has survived the siege, who fought and won the impossible fight and set off the turning point of WWII.

ak1214 The heroic defense of the city of Leningrad and the superhuman endurance of its citizens during one of the worst sieges in history, is beautifully depicted in the stunning, heartbreaking film "Leningrad", written and directed by Alexandr Buravsky.I have been teaching a Film History course at Indiana State University for over 25 years and happened to be in London on the day the film was screened. What luck! Kate is a foreign journalist who misses her plane and is forced to survive in the besieged city. She's both an outsider (English) and an insider (of Russian descent). Caught between the Soviet apparatchiks who refuse to give up Leningrad matter the cost and the Germans who are hell-bent on conquering it, Kate, for the first time in her life is faced with a choice – survive or die. She chooses the latter, helping others survive in the process. The transformation she goes through and the final choice that she makes, will make even the strongest among us cry. Yet the film is fiercely, stubbornly unsentimental, which is one of its great strengths. It's not just a film about what the Russian people had to endure during the almost nine hundred-day siege; it's an honest, authentic testament to the triumph of the soul in the face of unspeakable adversities.My only regret is that "Leningrad" is not playing in the U.S theaters. I sincerely hope that North American distributors get a chance to view this powerful movie and appreciate it not only for its emotional gravity and entertainment value, but for its commercial possibilities as well. This may be the year of "Avatar", but for all its technical brilliance, Cameron's film couldn't hold a candle to Buravsky's.