Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Ashleymyers Enjoyed both Daniel Radcliffe and Jon Hamm but to have Hamm play the older Radcliffe? I mean he's graduated medical school and working as a young doctor so he'd be in his 20's and 5'5" but in his forties he's 6'2"? Dark comedy/drama - it was different lol and Radcliffe does a brilliant Jon Hamm imitation. On the serious side. It's interesting to see how the young doctor begins his journey optimistically and wanting to change the world, how he becomes jaded and the old doctor realizes his regrets and wishes like many of us do that we could go back and talk to our younger self and change the course our lives.

Harriet Deltubbo It is a powerful film, but I doubt I will ever want to watch it again. In the early 20th century, a young doctor arrives in a small Russian village around the time of the Russian Revolution to work in the local hospital. The real centerpiece of the film is its acting. This is a story about a place most people might not be able to conceive. All the characters struggle against a system that has perpetuated falsehoods. OK, there are some flaws and I am not too naive to suggest this movie is worthy of an Oscar. My advice would be to watch this movie in full before you judge it. It shows how wrapped up we can become. It deserves its final rating of 7/10.

karel de Vries The series failed to convince me. Acting is no more than average, even John Hamm cannot save the otherwise poor cast. The story is set in some remote location in Russia. I have no idea where it was actually shot, but the special effects leave a lot to be desired: Artificial snow falling in front of a snowy landscape. The young doctor lugging his suitcase over snow-swept planes. The doctor covered in ketchup or mayonnaise every time he comes near a patient, depending on whether it was a delivery or an abscess respectively. All clearly photo-shopped and unconvincing.The worst thing is that in struggling through episodes 1-3 an acute sense that I was watching an American perspective on Siberia never left me. The atmosphere of the series is not Russian at all.This is just a weak attempt to make a quick dollar, an embarrassing underestimation of the audience: cheap!

siderite I was watching this mini series of only four episodes, each only twenty minutes long, and wondering. First, why am I watching this? Why am I enjoying it? It is the tale of an inexperienced doctor, fresh out of school forced to work in a small village. Set right after the first World War, or maybe even during it, in a region of Russia so remote that the war would not have counted anyway, it shows the barbaric medical practices of the time, the horrible transformation of a naive and idealistic doctor into a desensitized morphine addict.But I did enjoy it. It is both comedy and terrible drama. The actors are perfect for their roles, the atmosphere is despondent and the Russian theme of the story gives an air of surreal to it all (even if for me personally, it is at least geographically closer than to an American audience). Even if about terrible things, the film is really quite quite good.My second reason to wonder is how can a such a good show that is this dark and full of hopelessness even make the screen? Audiences will be shocked and disgusted by a period in human's history that they don't want to acknowledge and a character that is both very close to one's heart, but impossible to accept as similar to one.I can only surmise that, just like the original short stories escaped the Russian censorship, the show also somehow managed to escape audience's democratic censorship of shows that are too real to watch. Quite hard to bear so much reality, in fact, but found myself immediately looking for clues for a next season. I doubt there will be one, but I would watch it if it were.The history of the crew that got together to place on screen such an obscure collection of short stories is also fascinating. Do search for it, you will understand more about the background of the series and maybe even make you read the original material, why not?