"Guerman's masterpiece. . . . the most provocative new Russian film to appear in New York since Tarkovsky's Stalker" (J. Hoberman), My Friend Ivan Lapshin ranks as one of the most important films of postwar Soviet cinema; indeed, it was voted the greatest Soviet film of all time by Russian critics. "This will be a sad tale," the narrator promises us at the film's outset, and so it proves. Ivan Lapshin is a middle-aged, lantern-jawed police agent in a Volga port city in 1935, with Stalin's Great Terror at its peak. Hapless in love and prone to accidents, Lapshin falls in love with Natasha, an actress in a second-rate travelling theatre troupe, blind to the fact that she cares more for his friend, a suicidal journalist. Though Natasha declares that she is not one of Chekhov's young ladies, the mood of the film is indeed Chekhovian in its pathos and comedic rue, while the restless camera (tracking and swivelling to take in the whole exhilarating spectacle) and mixing of colour sequences with black-and-white make Lapshin one of Guerman's most visually inventive films. Not to be missed!