The movie's actual story line-which the present-day narrator, a Russian relief worker telling his life story to a group of German children trapped under building wreckage in the wake of a tsunami in Japan (those who have some background in Russia's foreign relations will not find this narrative convolution completely gratuitous), frames as an explanation of how he can claim five fathers-is adapted from a section of Vasily Grossman's epic novel "Life And Fate." In that novel, a small cadre of Russian soldiers defends an apartment building in the title city against surrounding German troops. It's a mixed bag overall-hence my star rating-but it's worth seeing nonetheless, largely because of the explicitly Russian qualities its sustains. It begins with a present-day frame story, just as Spielberg's " Saving Private Ryan" did. It features a deft but unquestionably sentimental musical score from Angelo Badalamenti, a Hollywood veteran. It's shot in not just an iteration of IMAX but in IMAX 3D. So it's slightly peculiar to me that "Stalingrad," the new movie directed by Fedor Bondarchuk (the son of the great Russian classicist director Sergei Bondarchuk, and the half-brother of actress Natalya Bondarchuk, who starred in Tarkovsky's 1972 "Solaris"), aspires in some ways to the conditions of an American war movie, or just an American movie period.
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