FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Derrick Gibbons An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

arijalokinos Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer. Excellent pair in a movie that receives most of my stars from music, written by Jerry Goldsmith. While the story itself unfolds kinda slowly I still find it intriguing. The bias is not either on Russian or USA sided which is quite refreshing. This movie is worth watching on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

smatysia I have read a few John Le Carre books (although not The Russia House) and was not as impressed as most other people seemed to be. People say that the movie is slow and cerebral (and it is) but really that is how Le Carre's books read. Sean Connery never puts in a bad performance, and neither does Michelle Pfeiffer. And it never hurts that she is sooooo beautiful. Klaus Maria Brandauer is also always good and still is here. The problem is the script, which relates back to the source material. It is a little bit of a bore. Not badly, just a bit. It looks like the filmmakers were so proud to be filming in the USSR, that they went a little overboard. Not every place in Russia is St. Basil's and the Winter Palace. Overall the film is OK.

Glifada Without any hesitation, I admit: this is one of my favorite movies! To be more precise, it's one of the top 5 movies I have ever seen, and a rare one I watched several times in the course of the two decades (in cinema, on video or TV). I noticed an interesting development of my attitude towards this movie: my first watching hasn't resulted in a special satisfaction (as far as I remember), but every subsequent time the movie engaged me more and more. Obviously, this masterpiece of non-standard political thriller should be seen more then once! What is so good about it? I would say – everything! First, the theme: a subtle story of personal relationship (ending with love affair) between two people from different political worlds placed in the atmosphere of the last faze of the cold war era and the beginning of the USSR collapse. Second: the brilliant main roles performed by Sean Connery (charming as always) and Michelle Pfeiffer (probably her best appearance ever; she was so persuasive in the role of a 'typical' Slavic character and mentality). Third: some amazing scenes of dilapidated Moscow environment, conveying the atmosphere of a derelict regime which is about to be changed. Fourth: excellent, unobtrusive and well attuned music. Fifth: a contrived direction and film editing ('fusion' of two different scenes), etc.All in all, The Russia House is a masterpiece of its kind and I wander about the pretty low rating it got at IMDb.com. It's not fair in this case. It's not fair, indeed!

Michael Neumann Sean Connery further undermines his James Bond image by portraying, with obvious irony, a grubby amateur spy exploited by British Intelligence to obtain top secret information from somewhere inside the Kremlin. It's a far cry from Ian Fleming, presenting a serious, more credible espionage caper and suggesting that underneath the cosmetic reforms of glasnost the same invisible wheels continue turning (and for spy writers like John Le Carré, they had better be). The game of bluff and counter-bluff will be familiar to any fan of cloak-and-dagger fiction (the true villains, not surprisingly, are the gray-suited puppet-masters of the SIS and CIA), but all the clichés of the genre are at least brought together with a craftsmanship rare in Hollywood at the time. Director Fred Schepisi takes advantage of the Russian locations by making the film into something of a wide-screen travelogue, but the absurd, happily-ever-after epilogue is out of place: it looks like an imposed afterthought, and certainly can't match the more thoughtful ambivalence of the book's final pages.