2025 has been a good year for Russian actor Yura Borisov, who shot to international fame and got an Oscar nomination for his role in "Anora," with none other than Robert Downey Jr. calling him out during the ceremony: "Brother, you have a great future, you are in the right place. Am I right? Yes!"

While Hollywood has welcomed Borisov with open arms, the actor continues to make Russian films, two in 2025 in which he plays very different characters. The first is "Konchitsa Leto" ("Summer Will End") in which the actor plays Kesha, a young man who returns to his "native" Yakutia after having served a prison sentence. Kesha, his brother Tima and their father are a family of Slavic men living in a Turkic environment – an aspect of the story that is not made much of in the film. The brothers have Yakutian girlfriends: Tima’s is already playing the daughter in law role, even though things have not been formalized and Tima is planning to leave the antipodes to go pursue his dreams of a university education.

The name of the film itself is a nod to Russian multiculturalism, as it is the title of a very popular song by the legendary Russian-Korean rock star Viktor Tsoi who met a tragic end. Summers are famously short in Yakutia and when Kesha celebrates his return by singing Tsoi’s "Summer will end" we know he is not heading anywhere good.

We see Kesha trying to return to work at the local gold mine, and I have a flashback to the 2021 film "Compartment No 6" where Borisov plays a Russian lad who has to go to the "North" to do hard labour. In "Compartment No 6" he is a much more sympathetic character and "Summer Will End" seems to be a much more "Russian" take on what happens to youth who have been given no prospects by state and society. The actor playing Tima, Makar Khlebnikov, is also reprising his characterization from the 2023 film "Bullfinch," a Russian young man of a newer generation doing his best to survive in a toxic male world, with better prospects than his older brother.

Back in Yakutia, when things go south at the mine as they must, Kesha and Tima take a road trip through Russia’s northern reaches where Slavs become even thinner on the ground. On marshrutkas and boats they travel, leaving a trail of white, colonial crimes behind them. The film, as some critics have pointed out, takes on an aspect of settler colonial criticism while on the surface it is a police chase with two young men gone rogue.

'The Poet'

While Borisov plays all the above-mentioned roles with his natural Russian bald head, for "The Poet," in which he has the title role of Alexander Pushkin, he dons a curly wig, and conveniently dispels all memories of the poor Russian lad who has been let down by the system. Pushkin is a man who has been very much helped by the system, having had a royal education and been appointed to various parts of the Russian Empire. The film will have us believe that he was "exiled" to certain places, but he always ends up on his feet and returns to the imperial capital, St. Petersburg.

"The Poet" is a musical of sorts, with several spoken word scenes that detail Pushkin’s life. The film portrays very well how the nobility of the period, to which Pushkin belonged, spoke mostly French. Having him do a spoken word bit in Russian in his imperial lycee is a reminder that Pushkin proved to the Russian public that their language was just as good as French to do literature with.

In the classroom, he stands out with his curly hair and way with words, and it would be a dereliction of duty if I did not mention that one of his maternal great-grandfathers was an Ethiopian, by way of Istanbul. With his gift of poetry, he is understandably very popular with the young crowd, and especially the ladies. While Borisov does his best with the material, the color scheme and the movement of the camera eerily resemble videos generated by AI, as women who look exactly alike swoon, whispering his name while he falls in love with the wrong women.

The film makes much of Pushkin’s momentary fall from imperial grace during the 1825 Decembrist uprising, when his poem "Ode to Liberty" is found among the belongings of the rebels. But of course, Pushkin is his own worst enemy, marrying a girl half his age and then suffering fits of jealousy which end in a – spoiler! – fatal duel.

But naturally, such literary giants never die. To drive this point home, the director shows us a sweeping scene of the people of St. Petersburg mourning him, and then the camera moves on to a young man who approaches a publisher about a poem he has written about the death of Pushkin. The publisher asks his name, and of course, the answer is Mikhail Lermontov, who in turn – spoiler! – dies in a duel following his idol. There is, in this scene, a hint that the producers may go for a series of these films in which they treat illustrious figures from Russian literature and history.

Having now proven he can look convincing in roles that require a bald head and a hoodie, or roles that require curls and an imperial uniform, Borisov has become the hot ticket of Russian cinema. It will be interesting to see whether international filmmakers will make him their go-to man for "Russian villain" or whether they will keep casting him in "essentially good man caught up in circumstance."