Word: russianize
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...RUSSIAN TO JUDGMENT...
...Dirty Pretty Things, this film is set in immigrant London - this time, members of the Russian diaspora, some honest, most not. And like A History of Violence, it's about a mysterious gunman (Mortensen again) and his connection with an ordinary family drawn into the web of mob intrigue. Anna (Naomi Watts) is a half-Russian midwife who's come into possession of a diary whose secrets could bring down the gang empire run by restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). She makes the mistake of giving the diary, which she can't read, to Semyon, and he assigns Nikolai (Mortensen...
...pieces: a barber-shop murder in the first few minutes, and a long, brutal fight in a bathhouse between Mortensen and two thugs; they're armed, he's naked. But at heart it's a two-family drama, one being Anna's sensible English aunt (Sinead Cusack) and crabby Russian uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski), the other Semyon and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Kirill is like a mutant Corleone: he has Sonny's hair-trigger impulses and Fredo's drug-addled weak streak, stemming from a need to be respected by his father and from Kirill's realization that...
...movie doesn't rise above its genre conventions so much as it burrows into them, finding complexities and contradictions in the standard tropes. You'll learn plenty about the perils of disappointing a strong patriarch, not to mention the iconography of Russian gangland tattoos. Cronenberg orchestrates all this, and his dedicated cast, to turn out an exercise that is brisk, dark, compelling ... everything but Canadian...
Demand has never been greater, given the growing supply of Russian oligarchs, hedge-fund honchos, Chinese capitalists and overpaid ceos. "The amount of money in private hands is unprecedented," says Andrew Harper, editor in chief of Andrew Harper's Hideaway Report, a Baedeker for the wealthy. In this new Gilded Age, he says, the business is in class, not mass. "There have always been people who could afford the presidential suite, but now it's a legitimate market...