Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Superb modern parable from a seditious Russian novel of 1925 by Mikhail Bulgakov that didn't see the light of day until the 1980s. This is cleverly photographed in sepia hues alongside some brilliantly restored and copied archive-footage, but at the same time it feels very contemporary and accessible with great definition close up, haunting polyphonic choral music, excellent comic acting, so it's got pretty much everything right. The Amazon sleeve art was a little off-putting looking rather cheap and amateur which it is neither - quite the opposite - it's clearly lavishly produced, ironically by Leninfilm. Ask anyone in eastern Europe, they've seen this film, but may not have heard of the book of its long history.The story is a biting satire of Soviet communism and even when it was released it would have packed a punch, in fact it was surely art like this and other cultural dissent, not Ronald Reagan and Gorby that dismissed the regime, just a year later. The plot involves a slightly uncouth mongrel dog but ever so charming that undergoes an experiment that the Bolshevik-hating professor didn't bargain for.... There's a touch of horror, layer upon layer of contemporaneous & still relevant cultural/political references, but above all it takes the prize for being all this but still extremely funny, and warm and humane. A cracker.

(the review contains no spoilers to the actual plot, but I am discussing a few lines from the movie, which while have 0 impact on the plot, but may not be appreciated by everyone).I think other reviewers have captured the sense of this movie. Amazing story (obviously), amazing acting and dialogue. Great sets and atmosphere, but I wanted to mention something else...After living in the USA for 20+ years, something made me wonder. The main point of the movie is to critique ussr/communism and the movie done so with implacable detail. One thing that made me wonder is that professor was very serious when he mentioned how they removed rug from main entrance, stole galoshes and such. It's either such veiled acting or the professor is truly ignorant (in this case, it was either done with the sarcasm or not, I think the result in the same). I completely agree with the communism flaws and such (not to go off tangent), but one thing stands out. When 90% of the country is hungry and can't afford to feed/clothes or keep themselves warm, and he comments how he has light goes out twice a day now versus twice before in 20 years, somehow his problems are just not as important to me.Nevertheless, movie is brilliant in every way.

No words to describe this movie because it genius and fantastic! I recommend it for everybody! Must see from 10 y.o. and older. Need to read M.A.Bulgakov before. So I don't now what to write more, just cite: Despite its short size, this book has endless layers. On the surface, it is a hilariously sad story about a science experiment gone very wrong in the direction that its creator did not quite anticipate, and all the funny antics of the newly created sorta-human Sharikov. Yes, that includes obsessive and funny cat-chasing even when the dog becomes "human". On the other level, it is a cautionary warning about what happens when power falls in the hands of those who should not be allowed to yield it, and the dangers and pitfalls of the system that allows that to happen. Yes, that includes an easy step from killing cats to pointing guns at real people, and demanding sex in exchange for keeping a job, and of course the ultimate evil that was to penetrate the fabric of the years to come - writing denunciations for little else than petty personal gains.

How things change -- Mikhail Bulgakov's story "Heart of a Dog" couldn't be published in 1925 due to its implied criticism of the Bolsheviks of the time, but by the waning years of the Soviet Union, it was made into this lavish two-part adaptation for state television. On almost all counts it's a very good one, shot using monochrome photography which both allows genuine 1920s footage to be cut in a various points for effect, and compliments the very effective and bleak recreation of the era that the film achieves. "Heart of a Dog" is a marriage of absurdism and satire, and one thing that the film does very well is employ the absurdist technique of contrasting a potentially goofy idea (dog becomes a man) with deadly serious execution for maximum effect. Even more than the book, I felt, Bortko's film made excellent use of bleak scenes of the difficult winter street Sharik has come out of and the unsmiling revolutionaries in the building to create contrast an enhance the effect of the conceit. The actors deserve praise, especially Vladimir Tolokonnikov as the morose voice of Sharik, and later the dissipated Sharikov. One important thing, I thought, was missed in the translation from novel to film. In the text, a key element of the satire is that Sharik is a simpleminded and basically decent dog that only becomes a rake due to the influence of humanity. Here that point is blunted somewhat because his pre-humanity personality doesn't come through as strongly in the visual medium, despite the few segments of narration.