Tycoon

Director Pavel Lounguine's Tycoon aims to be an eastern European variant of Citizen Kane (with a bit of The Godfather thrown in), but it's more reminiscent of Mr. Arkadin (also known as Confidential Report), Orson Welles's thematically similar but much less successful 1955 picture. The focus in this case is on Platon Makowski (Vladimir Mashkov), an academic who builds an incredibly powerful business empire in post-Soviet Russia with the aid of a group of young friends, but eventually runs afoul of the government (just as so many of the early capitalist oligarchs have in real life). Revolving around an official investigation into Makowski's apparent assassination, the film is filled with flashbacks, abrupt plot twists, and sidebars on pervasive official corruption. Although moderately engaging as a kind of simplified encapsulation of recent Russian history through fact-based fiction (and boasting a strong performance by Mashkov), Tycoon nevertheless suffers from a lack of psychological depth, in either Makowski or the figures that surround him, and the film's technically impressive puzzle-like construction never leads to any great revelation (even one as rudimentary as Citizen Kane's Rosebud). Optional. [Note: DVD extras include a subtitled interview with director Pavel Lounguine and trailers. Bottom line: a small extras package for a interesting but flawed film.] (F. Swietek)