McGill East European and Russian Film/Documentary Series: "Tycoon – A New Russian" (2004, Russia, film, 128 minutes)

A stylish, slick crime drama based on the life of notorious billionaire Boris Berezovsky, "Tycoon" follows the life of Plato Makovski, a renegade Russian entrepreneur whose seductive and brutal climb to the top in the post-Soviet era flourishes as the line between business, crime and politics breaks down. Opening with Plato's assassination by car bomb, an investigation of his life through flashbacks, involving a vivid array of gangsters, mistresses, childhood friends, idealistic intellectuals and trigger-happy veterans, offers an inside view of a country in which gangsters and greedy politicians conspire to rub out their enemies. Building a media empire, Plato uses his genius to become a monster, unhesitatingly sacrificing his ideals and his closest friends until he topples. Compared by critics to "Scarface" and "The Godfather Saga," "Tycoon" is an epic tale of a visionary and scoundrel and, in the end, a bridge between the old Russia and the new.