“…a wee gem…Defiantly eccentric, Russian Snark is good enough to see twice…

Sinclair has turned in a film that made me do something no New Zealand-made feature film has since Boy: The next day, I went and saw it again.

Go and have a look.

” – Graeme Tuckett

Russian Snark (M) (78 min)

Directed by Stephen Sinclair.

Starring Stephen Papps, Elena Stejko.

Russian film-maker Misha and his beautiful wife, Nadia, arrive in Auckland in a lifeboat they have converted into a yacht.

With no money, and not much in the way of job offers, they move into a boarding house run by the kindly Stephanie Tauevihi.

Dissatisfied with her husband’s pig-headed refusal to change his ways, or even find a job, Nadia leaves, and enters a seedy world of stripping and “hostessing”.

It sounds a bit grim, but writer/ director Stephen Sinclair’s first spin behind the camera is anything but. Brief, good natured, defiantly idiosyncratic and eccentric, Russian Snark is a wee gem.

With bugger-all money, but a pack of great actors, a committed and vastly experienced crew, and that lovely, bleakly-comic script in hand, Sinclair has turned in a film that made me do something no New Zealand-made feature film has since Boy: The next day, I went and saw it again.

Go and have a look.

- The Dominion Post

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/film-reviews/5161891/Russian-Snark-a-wee-gem