Vasily Pichul’s Soviet film Malinkaia Vera, starring newcomer Natalya Negoda, never was quite the soft-core sizzler the publicity seemed to promise, but it’s a good movie about the dreariness of cramped family life in an industrial Ukrainian seaport, its family spats and volatile performances actually evocative of certain Italian pictures. The main characters are Vera, her alcoholic truck-driver father (Yuri Nazarov), her disapproving mother (Ludmila Zaitzeva), her somewhat sympathetic older brother, and a university student named Sergei (Andrei Sokolov), who moves into the family’s flat. (JR)