I recently discovered a film adaptation of the Brothers Karmazov directed by Yuri Moroz and featuring Sergei Gorobchenko and Aleksandr Golubev. I ordered it few months ago but I haven’t gotten a change to really delve into it. Now that it’s summer I have the time! I re-read the Brothers Karamazov on the plane ride to Paris so it’s fresh in my mind. 

The film is entirely in Russian with English subtitles so it takes some focus to watch it. I think it must have been a made for TV movie because it’s in a series of episodes covering two discs. 
It totals to somewhere around eight hours. I think this is probably the best way to present this film. Cutting it into a basic 3 hour movie slot would have meant cutting out a lot of good content from the book. I’ve watched three episodes so far and I’m enjoying it.

If you haven’t read the book it’s a little hard to follow, especially with the subtitles. The beginning jumps around around in time and has to quickly convey important information about the family. It also gets tricky when faced with each character’s philosophy on life. If you haven’t read the book and aren’t thoroughly read up on why each character believes what they believe it can be confusing.

But I’ve always felt that if you’re going to watch a movie based on a book you may as well read the book first. So far I feel the film is doing a good job of presenting the full story without cutting scenes due to time restrictions. The acting is decent and the costumes and setting are good. I haven’t seen other film adaptations of this particular book but I was pretty impressed with how this one was handled.