Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Woodyanders A highly unlikely Russian rock group and their greedy jerk manager (ably played to the smarmy hilt by Matti Pellonpaa) travel to America seeking fame and fortune. While en route to a wedding gig in Mexico, they are pursued by village idiot Igor (a hysterical portrayal by Kari Vaahanen) who wishes to join the band. Writer/director Aki Kaurismaki relates the engaging story at a steady pace, adroitly crafts and maintains a deliciously dry'n'deadpan tone throughout, and shows a genuine disarming affection for both its colorful idiosyncratic characters and the more flaky'n'seedy aspects of American culture. With their pointy shoes, stoic demeanors, and ridiculously massive unicorn hairstyles, the titular rock'n'roll group make for a likeable and amusing bunch of oddballs. Moreover, the scenes with the Leningrad Cowboys performing live in various sordid venues are a hoot, with the sequence in which they win over a hostile crowd in a sleazy biker bar with a fiery rendition of "Born To Be Wild" rating as a definite gut-busting highlight. A quirky delight.

ajrg-17-381639 This movie is a classic of deadpan absurd humor and is one of the best movies of all times. The group plays nothing but Finnish folk music and are rejected at home but sent to the US where they will listen to anything. From there it is different regions of the US with their different styles of music-and it is to me a kind of love story for these genres. In each place they do something in the local style or a parody of it. The movie makes fun of the band and Finnish culture and every kind of music as they head for Mexico where they going to play at a wedding. They even make fun of ranchero music and all of it they do well or at least well enough to make you laugh. I will never forget their country music song about being on collective #5 where his sweetheart ran off with a commissar. If you don't like it you just don't like music or deadpan humor.

Michael Neumann A family of ersatz, Eastern European musicians, with little talent beyond their 18-inch long pointed shoes and matching pompadours, tries to strike it rich in the New World, where anything goes, or so they hope. The episodic non-plot simply puts the unlikely ensemble in some equally unlikely settings (seedy urban truck stops, and so forth), and that, in or out of a nutshell, is the entire film.It's certainly the most accessible effort yet from the prolific Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, but this sort of deadpan irreverence can only be stretched so thin, and after a (short) while too much of the material is merely repetitive. Kaurismaki has often been called his country's answer to Jim Jarmusch (who appears here in a memorable cameo as a used car salesman), but on the evidence of this fitfully amusing one-joke novelty he may be embracing the comparison a bit too close.

Cowznofski A number of years back, we hired, one at a time, a bunch of Russian guys. Generally one guy would know others back home who wanted jobs, and gradually we got a good group this way. These were a great group of guys and generally above average to stellar performers.But what was so amazing to me was that the social hierarchy depicted in Leningrad Cowboys Go America, i.e. the way Vladimir interacted with the rest of the group, was spot on - our guys interacted in much the same way. The ideals, Go America, get rich, were shared by all.I suppose the Finns, having some excellent knowledge of what their neighbor was all about, have the upper hand when it comes to excellent parody.This is a great film - if you've worked with Russians, or if you just want to know what these guys are doing dressed up like the Blues Brothers, have a look at this film.