Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Commissar boasts the best soundtrack of any movie I have seen so far, and the cinematography is wonderful. It has come a long way since earlier Soviet films in which the camera is frantically switching back and forth. Specifically, the shots at the start of the film present a detailed scenery, while at the end, we see more focused views, like when the horses are pulling supplies.But my favorite feature of the film has to be the ambiguous ending. We aren't told if Klavdia survives and comes back to her child, or of its fate. This is a twist from similar movies. In Ivan's childhood, we find out that Ivan is dead at the end of the film. In Ballad of a Soldier, we know our soldier is already dead. That's not to say we don't feel for these characters, but there's little left to the viewer. All the information is given to us in the film - we aren't asked, "Do you believe Alexei survives and returns home after the war?" He doesn't. That automatically sets the tone for the rest of the film. With Commissar, we can ask ourselves, "Is this a hopeful film, or a darker one?" It's true that it has its share of conflict, but we can choose to believe the characters are happy at the end if we want. We do still know what ultimately happens historically, but the characters can be separate from that.Where the movie is flawed for me is in its simplistic setup. A woman needs to rely on people she is hesitant to trust and ends up trusting them. That's a great plot line, but for 60 minutes, not 103 minutes. As I watched the movie, I couldn't help but feel it could have done more with its time. In Ballad of a Soldier, there are multiple stages to the journey, each different. In Cranes Are Flying, the story is about Veronika, but switches to very distinct scenes of Boris, as well as focusing on the characters' lives before, during, and after the war. Here, we see Klavdia at the village, and that's about it. Yes, we see the village before and after the conflict, and Klavdia before and after she gives birth, but it could have been better still. We could have seen Klavdia's soldiers trying to make do without her. Or a view of the White Army. The film is solid and stands on its own, but it feels like more could have been made.

The story and characters are a bit thin; a female leader in the Russian Revolutionary army in 1922 is disgraced when she is found to be pregnant, and goes to live with a Jewish family, loses her hard shell and becomes a mother. But the black and white images are truly striking and impressive, especially the fantasy sequences. They give the story a much deeper power and resonance than it would otherwise have. Especially impressive as a first film. this was suppressed by the Moscow authorities for 20 years for it's sympathetic view of Jews and their oppression in Russia, and the implication that the USSR was complicit in knowing about and not stopping the concentration camps of WW 2.

The biggest surprise about this little seen Soviet drama (revived in the late 1980s) isn't that it was banned for two decades, but that it was ever made at all. The film is openly critical of the Revolution, but not from behind the fancy metaphoric camouflage used in other repressed Iron Curtain features. Instead, it offers a direct and sensitive story of a dedicated but pregnant Red Army Commissar who, sometime during the 1930s, finds shelter with a Jewish family and is transformed by their affection. In the end she has to choose between motherhood and the Motherland, but her decision to follow military duty does nothing to diminish her new found sympathy for her surrogate family, and before rejoining her company (slogging through an unglamorous landscape of Ukrainian ice and mud) she entrusts her baby to the care of people (and, by extension, a tradition) she has learned to love. Stylistically, the film is a mix of poetic realism with occasionally self-conscious (but effective) montage flashbacks, plus one haunting flash-forward anticipating the Holocaust.

Don't be tricked by the rating. This movie is wildly, unforgivably underrated on IMDb. To speak of its beauties would take me volumes. Suffice it to say: find it, if you can (it may be still available in good video stores, on VHS) and be enthralled by one-of-a-kind movie. As opposed to overrated 8+ 9+ c... like American Beauty or the Korean Oldboy and other movies full of either vapid pomposity or of guts and gore and blood and nonsense, Komissar is an extraordinarily beautiful and fluent meditation on human nature, war, religion, childhood, good and evil. Miss it at your own peril.10 out of 10