Yes, there is a hint in them: three fairy tales will compete for the viewer at once.

As if on New Year's Eve, several large projects are released nationally on the eve of the autumn holidays. The animated blockbuster Finnick 2 is a continuation of the story that all children have been watching for several years. "Alice in Wonderland" is an attempt to translate a performance with songs by Vysotsky into the language of the younger generation. "Gorynych" is a folklore fantasy in the spirit of "The Last Hero" and "At the behest of a pike." There is a risk of not noticing the Anatoly Belkin doc and the Johnny Mnemonic reissue next to the family projects. Izvestia tells us what to watch this weekend.

"Alice in Wonderland", 6+

Director: Yuri Khmelnitsky Starring: Anna Peresild, Milos Bikovic, Paulina Andreeva, Irina Gorbacheva, Sergey Burunov, Polina Gukhman, Ilya Lykov

By the end of Thursday, the box office leader in Russia was the fairy tale "Alice in Wonderland", and there is nothing surprising here. Most likely, she will also be in first place in the top of the weekend: the film has an aggressive promotional campaign, a record number of superstars in roles of any kind, and Alice is played by Anna Peresild, who after "The Word of the Boy" became a sex symbol, although she did not even reach adulthood.

It is difficult to say how much the film will appeal to the adult audience, that is, to the parents who will come with the children. For the older generation, the main "Alice" is an audio performance with songs by Vysotsky, and although many adaptations of this tale have appeared since then, one surreal than the other, no one has been able to move the Soviet masterpiece of the radio theater in the popular consciousness. And in the minds of the film's authors, too, by the way: Vysotsky's poetry sounds here with new arrangements and, of course, voices, and it's a matter of personal taste how much you might like it, as well as the fact that "The Ballad of Love", which is completely far from Carroll, suddenly sounded here. How will a seasoned audience accept a film where nothing remains of the rebellious absurdism and socio-political satire of the original? And what would the children who, say, went to the Fomenko Theater to see Alice through the Looking Glass, which has been one of the most fashionable performances in Moscow for many years? All this will be clear by the second weekend, when the effect of the sundress will take effect. In the meantime, Alice manages the cash register quite convincingly.

Gorynych, 6+

Director: Dmitry Khonin Starring: Alexander Petrov, Victoria Agalakova, Alexander Robak, Sergey Makovetsky, Alexey Filimonov, Roman Kurtsyn, Sergey Epishev, Evgeny Serzin, Dmitry Kulichkov

It's finally happened: for many years now, Sergei Makovetsky has been a wayward prince from cartoons about heroes for most Russian children, but now he has finally become a prince in a feature film, and this is a sensation and, as they say, a "brain explosion." And this is the main surprise of "Gorynych", perhaps much more unexpected than the fact that the protagonist is played by Alexander Petrov. Although it's funny that his Alyosha is a diver who sank in one place and surfaced in a completely different place and on a different device. There are a lot of funny shifters in Gorynych that adults will understand, but it will be just funny for children.

Going out on the same weekend with Alice is not an easy task, and Finnik 2 is also launching a full—fledged release, also 6+, and all these releases will divide the children's audience until the end of the autumn holidays. "Gorynych" has folklore motifs among his trump cards, which are related to his hits "The Last Bogatyr" and, even more so, to "At the Behest of the Pike." There is a consumer for such content, and there is a constant shortage, because it is very expensive to make a fairy tale film.

Finnik 2, 6+

Director: Denis Chernov Starring: Mikhail Khrustalev, Veronika Makeeva, Ida Galich, Slava Kopeikin, Yuri Kolokolnikov

Finnik allowed itself a certain head start: it started in preview format last weekend and earned more than 70 million rubles. This means that he proved to the cinemas that they should give him shows, because people go even before the rental. Over the weekend, we'll see how well this strategy has worked. This includes film sites, which now have to decide which family content they will have more. In any case, since Finnick is the only animation here, it should have almost all the morning sessions, and in the evenings the adult audience will continue to go to August, as it has been doing for more than a month, which has already brought the picture more than a billion rubles.

Finnick is unlikely to aim for such figures, but it is quite capable of earning half a billion, that is, about the same as the first part, which was released in 2022. It's funny that the events of the two paintings are separated by only one year, not three. Finnick is no longer invisible here, which puts his life at risk, and if he and Kristina do not urgently find one magical artifact, things will go very badly. Let's hope that everything will work out for them and we won't have to wait another three years for the next cartoon about brownies.

"Anatoly Belkin. High water, 18+

Directed by Julia Bobkova

It is difficult to say what is in Yulia Bobkova's film about Anatoly Belkin that he was given the 18+ category, but it can be said with full confidence that this picture will adorn any leisure time. Bobkova is generally a portrait documentarian who is worth remembering if you don't know her yet. She once broke into the pantheon of modern Russian documentary cinema with the sensational film The Last Waltz. Extremely simple in method, but incredibly accurate in intonation and intelligence, it was not just a conversation with Oleg Karavaichuk, but perhaps the best thing that has ever been filmed about him.

A student of Sergei Miroshnichenko, Bobkova is today his main aesthetic heir, and when we look at her paintings about Kalashnikov and Stanislavsky, we involuntarily recall the classic paintings "The Sacrament of Marriage", "The Russian Cross", "The River of Life". Bobkova also worked on Miroshnichenko's latest film from the cycle about Solzhenitsyn. In the film about Belkin, the forgotten thing reappears, which is so valuable for Russian cinema in its line, which it inherits from the thawing documentaries. Perhaps this lyrical portrait is old-fashioned, but this is exactly the classic that is missing and which, frankly, simply disappears along with those who still know how to use this "alphabet" and who still miraculously preserved this intellectual optics in their eyes.

"Johnny Mnemonic", 18+

Director: Robert Longo Starring: Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer, Ice-Tee, Takeshi Kitano, Dennis Akayama, Dolph Lundgren, Henry Rollins, Barbara Zukova, Udo Kier

The legendary movie of the era of video recorders, the iconic representative of cyberpunk, "Johnny Mnemonic" is like a bridge between "Blade Runner" and "The Matrix". Today, it's even a little scary to review it on the big screen in its restored form.: what should I do if the magic evaporates and "those" old impressions that are still alive today fade? If the film is hopelessly outdated, and the quotes from there that Russian schoolchildren communicated with don't seem so aphoristic anymore? There is only one way to check, and old friends and families will come here, but it's not every day that you have the opportunity to see such a significant film on the big screen in Russia.

A young Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, who is losing popularity, Takeshi Kitano, who is at the peak of acting and directing fame, Ice-T with Henry Rollins, charismatic Udo Kier — and all this in the futuristic setting of a thriller about people who carry other people's memories as contraband. By the way, the action takes place in 2021, which in 1995 seemed so far away, although no one, even in their darkest fantasies, imagined what it would actually be like.