Tag: Siberia

Keanu Reeves in SIBERIA Arrives on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital September 18th

Keanu Reeves stars in the gripping thriller Siberia, arriving on Blu-ray™ (plus Digital), DVD and Digital September 18 from Lionsgate.

Keanu Reeves stars in the gripping thriller Siberia, arriving on Blu-ray™ (plus Digital), DVD and Digital September 18 from Lionsgate. This film is currently available On Demand. The film tells the tale of a U.S. diamond merchant who begins an intense love affair with a local woman and finds himself falling deeper into the treacherous world of the diamond trade. The Siberia Blu-ray and DVD will be available for the suggested retail price of $21.99 and $19.98, respectively.

Keanu Reeves delivers the action in this thriller packed with pulse-pounding suspense. In Russia to sell rare jewels to a businessman with underworld connections, U.S. diamond merchant Lucas Hill (Reeves) falls into a torrid affair with Katya (Ana Ularu), a local café owner. When the deal suddenly goes south, Lucas and Katya are caught in a deadly crossfire between the buyer and Russian agents, as Lucas takes up arms in a furious fight to save Katya and himself.

BLU-RAY/DVD/DIGITAL SPECIAL FEATURES

  • “Passion and Intrigue: Bringing Siberia to Life” Featurette

CAST

Keanu Reeves                        The Matrix franchise, Speed, Point Break

Ana Ularu                                Outbound, Inferno, A Very Unsettled Summer

Pasha D. Lychnikoff               TV’s “Deadwood,” “Shameless,” “The Big Bang Theory”

Dmitry Chepovetsky               Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, Man of the Year

James Gracie                         Eye in the Sky, The Journey is the Destination

Eugene Lipinski                      The Recruit, Superman II, Shock Treatment

Rafael Petardi                         TV’s “2 Broke Girls,” “Taken,” “NCIS: Los Angeles”

with Veronica Ferres              Salt and Fire, Hector and the Search for Happiness

and Molly Ringwald                The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Tempest

SIBERIA – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

For all the perceived masculinity surrounding the myth that is Keanu Reeves, there’s something immensely tender about his screen presence. He’s got a stone face, but hiding behind it is the melodramatic soul of a Shakespeare protagonist. He attacks drama like he’s ripping his heart out and screaming into the heavens how much that he loves. This feeling is present in all of his work, action or not. You might see the same man in My Own Private Idaho as you do in John Wick, but at least that man has a soul. At least, you can empathize with him.

Siberia, a new drama starring Reeves is acidic through and through. It’s about a cold man in a cold world, in a situation that is built to drain him of love. As a plot, it starts off simple enough with Reeve’s Lucas Hill organizing the sale of diamonds and befriending a young woman named Katya (a commanding Ana Ularu) but soon descends into a sickening mixture of interactions all leading to a final, defeating, ending.

Siberia is the type of movie that would be released wide during the mid to late 90’s, but in this day and age, might be left to digital platforms. Seeing as it does seem like a 90’s movie, there is a sense of toxic machismo hanging over the entire thing. The movie is lucky, though. Due to the very charisma of Keanu Reeves that sickening taste doesn’t appear often. Reeves is REALLY good at the stuff he’s doing here: being in love, shooting people, and acting like the most bereaved guy in the world, and he grounds the entire production with his performance. You can’t help but empathize with a man who looks so kind most of the time. Siberia also tends to place him in situations that feel partially subversive of the more masculine aspects of Reeves’ character, with the plot often throwing him and his cohorts into situations so unlucky that it would take only a good man to escape.

The film does stumble over this sometimes though. As events expand, Katya’s character becomes less of a character and more of a prop. She’s allowed her own emotions in the slow burn first act of the film but soon finds herself relegated to the role of just another character lacking agency of her own. That’s not too big of a problem, as most of the good guys don’t have much agency within the plot (just part of the point), but there’s an especially terrible scene near the end of the movie, that feels exploitative and badly put together, that reduces her to being just another piece of meat.

That becomes slightly unforgivable as the film goes on and gets nastier and nastier, (there’s a sense it’s trying too hard to make you uncomfortable), but the resounding, very dark ending eventually gives way to the films intention of crafting an experience that no person gets out of unscathed. It’s the perfect ending for this movie.

The direction of the film also skews competent which helps sell the ludicrous premise and somewhat hamfisted script. Siberia is primarily a character piece and director Matthew Ross makes sure to craft it like one. He exposes a melodramatic verve that keeps the film arresting, even when the plot slows down.

Siberia really isn’t a great movie, but it is well made and survives on the charisma of its leading man. It works well to his strengths and even lets him fire off a couple of rifle rounds, which is all it needed to do. It’s not particularly great, not particularly terrible, just pretty good. This seems like a year of pretty good movies for Reeves, with Destination Wedding coming up soon.

3 out of 5 Stars

Saban Films will release  SIBERIA in theaters and On Demand / Digital HD on July 13, 2018. 

Keanu Reeves Stars In SIBERIA – In Theaters And On Demand Friday, July 13

Hitting theaters on Friday, July 13 is Saban Films’ SIBERIA starring Keanu Reeves.

Check out the trailer below.

The film also features Ana Ularu, Pasha D. Lychnikoff, Dmitry Chepovetsky, James Gracie, Eugene Lipinski, Rafael Petardi, with Veronica Ferres and Molly Ringwald.

SIBERIA follows Lucas (Reeves), an American diamond merchant, who travels to St. Petersburg to sell rare blue diamonds of questionable origin. As the deal immediately begins to collapse, Lucas travels to Siberia in search of his missing partner and their diamonds, where he quickly falls into a relationship with Katya (Ularu), the owner of a small Siberian café. As Lucas and Katya’s passion builds, so does the treacherous world of the diamond trade from which he is unable to extricate himself. Both collide as Lucas desperately searches for an escape route in a world with no exit.

The film is directed by Matthew Ross (FRANK & LOLA). “I think his film Frank and Lola had great taste and was moving and intimate,” says Reeves. “Working with Matthew has been really a pleasure. He has a vision for the film and has been really responsive to the writing, to the original material, but he’s really taking it in a very romantic emotional direction, which I think is fantastic. He has a real eye in terms of the aesthetics. What I want out of a director is someone with a vision, who can look at what they are seeing, hear what they are hearing, and then give direction. That’s Matthew.”

Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans are the film’s composers. Ross first partnered with the two on FRANK & LOLA and he’s known them long before any of them began their careers in feature filmmaking. “I love working with old friends, especially when those old friends happen to be musical geniuses – it was clear when they were playing in rock bands back when we were ‘kids’ and especially now” says Ross. “I’m really proud of the score they composed for SIBERIA. As we did with Frank & Lola, I wanted to create an environment where risktaking wasn’t just encouraged but necessary. And they just killed it. We wanted to go for a Bernard-Herrmann-meets-Tchaikovsky kind of vibe. They took that and ran with it. The music they comnposed has a profound effect on the viewing experience. It doesn’t simply augment the story’s exisiting emotions; it also creates new ones.”

You can also catch the film streaming On Demand.

Photos courtesy of Saban Films.

THE WAY BACK – The Blu Review

In 1941, a group of men from various countries and personal backgrounds makes a daring escape from a Russian gulag during the height of the Soviet Union’s brutal and inhumane rise to power as a Communist powerhouse. This rag tag group of men traveled more than 4,000 miles by foot across the most rugged and harsh landscapes; across the bitter cold of Siberia, through the endless desert and finally across the Himalayan mountains, to reach their freedom, defined differently by each man. Three men survived this awesome trek. THE WAY BACK is inspired by these real events.

Writer/director Peter Weir (THE TRUMAN SHOW, DEAD POET’S SOCIETY) brings us THE WAY BACK, one story of a less-familiar part of history from the WWII era, whereas the cruelty of Stalin’s Communist Soviet empire was greatly overshadowed by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Innocent men, both young and old, were sentenced to as much as 25 years in filthy, ramshackle gulags — or prisons — for as little as speaking negatively about the Communist party, participating in religion or the arts, or for merely being a foreigner.

THE WAY BACK makes a stellar first impression, featuring a cast including Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Saoirse Ronan, and Colin Farrell. Ed Harris (APPALOOSA, GONE BABY GONE) plays an American engineer who goes by the name Mr. Smith, determined to escape and survive as a way of self-punishment. Jim Sturgess (HEARTLESS, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE) plays Janusz, a polish man betrayed by his own wife, determined to return home to his wife someday. Colin Farrell (CRAZY HEART, IN BRUGES) plays Valka, a Russian career criminal who serves a utilitarian purpose for the first leg of their journey to freedom.

All three actors deliver fine performances, but I especially enjoyed watching Farrell take on a somewhat animated but realistic Russian criminal. Personally, my top praise goes to Saoirse Ronan (HANNA, THE LOVELY BONES) who plays Irena, a polish teenage girl who fled the Communist takeover of Poland. Ronan continues to prove she is a major star in the making; she gives a compelling performance as Irena, a girl with more heart and drive than she can bare. Among the multi-national cast, its also worth mentioning Mark Strong (SHERLOCK HOLMES, ROBIN HOOD) who plays the motion picture actor Khabarov; a role that is brief but well portrayed.

The landscapes play a major role in THE WAY BACK. In the beginning of the film, an authority of the gulag explains to his prisoners how the true prison is not the guards, dogs and barbed wire, but rather the Siberian land itself… all 5 million square miles of the rugged, snow-covered country and it’s below zero extreme temperatures. In keeping with that powerful notion, Weir focuses his camera greatly on the vast and uninviting terrains in which the characters must cross by foot, with little to no water or food, and only their desire for freedom and each other to keep them alive.

THE WAY BACK (2010) is 133-minutes in length, but the pace allows the film to move along at a slightly more comfortable rate. I did not find myself checking the time or yawning at any point in the film, keeping my attention and interest; keeping my hopes for the characters up and my anticipation to see who survives the journey on a level equal to the average reality TV junkie’s. Ultimately, this is a film about human nature and our drive to survive and be free, no matter what the cost or obstacle standing before us, we’ll always find a way… or die trying.

THE WAY BACK Blu-Ray and DVD were released on April 19th, 2011.

Blu-Ray Special Features:

  • Behind-the-Scenes Featurette, “The Journey of the Journey”
  • THE WAY BACK Trailer
  • Trailers for THE RESIDENT and EVERY DAY

The special feature on this blu-ray disc are minimal, primarily consisting of the featurette titled “The Journey of the Journey.” This featurette contains a fair amount of actual behind-the-scenes footage, notably most interesting is how they constructed a forest in a sound stage which ultimately was used far more than the director has anticipated. The featurette does, however, contain a load of interview time with not just director Peter Weir, but also with the stars, including but not limited to Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess and Saoirse Ronan. These cast interviews offer an array of intimate perspectives on the history that inspired this film.

Otherwise, you’ll get a trailer for THE WAY BACK included in the special features and two trailers at the head of the film for THE RESIDENT and EVERY DAY, the first of which is somewhat forgettable and the second boasting another sizable cast of recognizable talent. The video transfer for THE WAY BACK, presented in 1080p High-Definition, suits the film, laden with landscapes and environmental textures. The audio within the film is mostly peaceful and serene, maintaining a consistent level, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1/Dolby Digital Stereo. THE WAY BACK blu-ray comes packaged in the standard translucent blue plastic keep case.