MAJOR, The

"Like an episode of The Shield transplanted to the snow-swept Russian countryside, writer-director Yuri Bykov's The Major is a tense, handheld police thriller filled with scores of dirty cops, scenes of abrupt violence and a relentless, overriding sense of nastiness." - Hollywood Reporter

Speeding through an icy, barren landscape to attend the birth of his own child, cop Sergey Sobolev instead kills another, running his car into a young boy. At this fork in the path of morality, he takes what will prove to be a very wrong turn by trying to sweep the incident under the carpet, enlisting his colleagues to try and implicate the boy's mother in his death.

Multi-hyphenate director Yuri Bykov, who also scored the film and plays one of the cops, exploits this premise to stunning effect, crafting a gritty character-driven morality tale heavy on action and suspense as it spins ferociously into its own conflicted shades of grey.

"Electric … Tracing how things go from bad to much, much worse when some corrupt cops try to cover up a hit-and-run by one of their own, this crime drama puts a distinctive, cynical Russian spin on genre material." - Variety