Free Republic

“The Master and Margarita” filmmaker Michael Lockshin is locked in a legal battle over his blockbuster Russian-language adaptation of the celebrated Soviet novel, with the director accusing two producers of blocking his efforts to bring his movie to U.S. cinemas. The lawsuit, which was filed by sales agent Luminosity Pictures and shared with Variety, alleges that producers Svetlana Migunova-Dali and Grace Loh, who are planning their own English-language adaptation of the book, cannot prove legitimate ownership of the rights to the novel. The suit also contends that “The Master and Margarita” — which was first published in the 1960s —...

A Russian doctor has been convicted of “promoting fascism” — for sharing the music video for The Cranberries’ anti-war mega-hit “Zombie.” Valery Kochnev, a surgeon and aspiring politician who had been running for a seat on the Veliky Novgorod’s City Council as a candidate from the Yabloko opposition party, was found guilty Tuesday of “displaying extremist symbols” and fined the equivalent of $20, his party said. The case revolved around a 2021 post that was published on Kochnev’s “V Kontakte” social media page — and which was discovered by a prosecutor with the Russian Internal Affairs Department’s Center for Countering...