At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Like most of films from Europe, especially from former USSR and today Russia, this one also sets focus on destiny of man, his inner struggle and his duty.What is usually called a "spy" is much more like sensitive data collection, and like it or not, 90% of that intelligence can be obtained through legal and publicly available medias, like newspapers, television and various publications.This is nothing like James Bond movies (it is very interesting that only few people realized occult elements in that serial, for 007 was created in memory of John Dee 1527-1609).Also, all KGB operatives and officers had at least university degree, real one and not like US quiz-college.They did a fine job, and they were more gentlemen (they were educated) than their counterparts from CIA/MI-6 which were mostly creating crisis and wars since their creation. Thanks to them, number of fascist plots of CIA/MI-6 were foiled.I read couple of reviews from US viewers, and it is interesting they came back for this old movie just to write something stupid about Putin.Are there any movies from Kenya, so people could mention Obama?

A lot of Russians incredibly even to this day would disagree with my assessment which is okay. I know the "new" country and the new mentality of the populace. It's getting more scary with every passing year. Here we are facing the 1968 production which became and remains a very popular set of four films, based on a fairly obscure novels. The best propaganda is always not that obvious, so to instill something into mass culture and consciousness, there is no need to film something a la Leni Riefenstahl or Soyuzkinozhurnal. In a milder totalitarian regime the means at disposal are much wider, and this is a good illustration for how it was done. To any reasonably thinking person then and certainly forty years later the whole plot appears as a ridiculous fantasy. This whole spy business obviously existed, but suffice it to say, very differently. To have a main hero, the son of a Russian count no less, secretly installed in the depth of the Soviet Union with a task to collect soil and water samples from suspected nuclear production facilities is a rather fantastic proposition. It gets even more fascinating when from the very first minutes it is alleged that the main assistance to the CIA spies is given by Nazi collaborators, traitors, Bandera nationalists and the likes, oh and the criminal element, of course. And so the film continues. The main spy base is run by West Germans (we are reminded of the unfortunate consequence of the unfinished business of socialist revolution throughout Europe), there are some amusing sequences about a lie detector test which KGB agent passes with heroic brilliance, scenes of some odd and quite improbable sea border crossing, etc. Obviously every move of the spy network is controlled by KGB, so there's no need to worry. Just avoid contact with foreigners, or if you have any, go talk to your local KGB clerk.The film was obviously intended for internal consumption, thus there is more mythology is thrown into the mix, this time for the soul. Apparently, all this spying Russian nobility is simply dying from nostalgia for their Motherland, i.e. things like fishing and birch trees and making love to big-breasted beautiful and good-natured Russian women. Thus, one can still convert these hostile elements into good Soviet citizens, given the right set of circumstances. The film ends with the resident spy arrested, and there will be more to follow. So why did people like this film and many continue to like it? I think the subject was fairly unusual: the spying/KGB theme is a rare event in the Soviet cinematography, actors rise adequately to the task, there are a few interesting songs, including very uncommon "blatnaya", i.e. from prison culture (Russians love the prison culture, go figure that slice of cultural history) and this whole plot somehow fit well into popular mythology about spy business. Needless to say the myth was a creation by Lubyanka masters as well.Nonsense it was, a dated nonsense it remains, loved by Russians of all ages. This is the saddest part, perhaps. The average mindset is different, but as twisted and manipulated as ever. On a less amusing note. The year was 1968, on August 20-21 the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to crush the "bourgeois" ideology and "anti-socialist" forces. And somewhere in Leningrad (St.Petersburg) a young boy Volodya/Vladimir Putin was watching this movie about a wonderful work of KGB and dreamed of bigger things to come.