

Heart of a Dog(1988)
"Heart of a Dog" is a Soviet film adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s iconic novella. Set in 1920s Moscow, it tells the satirical and darkly humorous story of a stray dog named Sharik, who is transformed into a human by Professor Preobrazhensky through a daring medical experiment. The resulting man, Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, embodies the social and ideological tensions of early Soviet society. With its sharp critique of class struggle, human nature, and the perils of radical change, the film is celebrated for its faithful adaptation, brilliant performances, and rich allegorical depth.

Movie: Heart of a Dog
Top 10 Billed Cast

Собачье сердце
HomePage
Overview
"Heart of a Dog" is a Soviet film adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s iconic novella. Set in 1920s Moscow, it tells the satirical and darkly humorous story of a stray dog named Sharik, who is transformed into a human by Professor Preobrazhensky through a daring medical experiment. The resulting man, Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, embodies the social and ideological tensions of early Soviet society. With its sharp critique of class struggle, human nature, and the perils of radical change, the film is celebrated for its faithful adaptation, brilliant performances, and rich allegorical depth.
Release Date
1988-11-11
Average
7.9
Rating:
4.0 startsTagline
Genres
Languages:
PусскийKeywords
Recommendations Movies

Dog Barbos and Unusual Cross(ru)
This is the very first silent slapstick comedy short about adventures of Worldly, Coward, and Fool. What's more fun: fishing with worms, or dynamite? Three friends decided to have a blast! Unfortunately their dog Barbos just loves playing fetch. And this time that stick was used for blast fishing. Barbos saw people throwing a smoking stick in a water, and fetched it right back to his owners. The "unusual cross" part begins when owners try to outrun the dog with dynamite.

Friends(en)
Paul, a rich English boy, and Michelle, an orphaned French girl, run away from home to a remote beach. Living on their own, their friendship grows into love.

Paris in August(fr)
A man is alone in Paris during the month of August while his woman and children go on vacation. He meets a young English girl posing as a model who came to Paris for a shoot.

The Edge(ru)
The action takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War in the Siberian hinterland, among Russians and Germans with damaged personal stories and a strange transformation: the victors seem to be crawling into the skins of the defeated, and vice versa. Ignat, is the embodiment of the larger-than-life image of the Soviet victorious warrior who, in fact, proves to be shell-shocked, sick and broken, although not completely destroyed. Trains become fetish for the heroes of the film, and speed becomes a mania; they virtually become one with their steam engines, while the machines take on human names. The heroes set up an almost fatal race in the Siberian forest, risking their own lives and those of others.

Three Men in a Boat(ru)
Three London gentlemen take vacation rowing down the Thames, encountering various mishaps and misadventures along the way.

On the Trail of the Bremen Town Musicians(ru)
Sequel to the cult Russian animation Bremenskie muzykanty (1969).

Welcome, or No Trespassing(ru)
A satirical comedy about the excessive restrictions that children face during their vacation in a Young Pioneer camp.

Cargo 200(ru)
While returning to Leningrad from a visit to his brother, Professor Artyom's car breaks down and he finds assistance at an isolated farmhouse occupied by Alexey, his wife, a Vietnamese laborer, and a stranger who wanders around the farm. When his car is repaired, Artyom leaves, drunk on moonshine, and students Valera and Angelika arrive. After Valera gets drunk, the stranger abducts Angelika.

The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!(ru)
A group of old friends have a tradition of going to a public bathing house on New Year's Eve. Occasionally too much vodka and beer makes two of them unconscious. The problem is that one of them (Sasha) has to go to Leningrad but another one (Zhenya) goes. Zhenya wakes up at Leningrad airport. Believing that he is still in Moscow he takes a taxi and goes home. The street name, building and even apartment number, the way an apartment complex looks the same and the key coincide completely - just typical Soviet-type 'economy' architecture. Imagine the surprise of Nadya when she enters her apartment and finds a man without trousers in her bed. What's more - Nadya's fiancé also finds him there...

I Know Who Killed Me(en)
An idyllic small town is rocked when Aubrey Fleming, a bright and promising young woman, is abducted and tortured by a sadistic serial killer. When she manages to escape, the traumatized girl who regains consciousness in the hospital insists that she is not who they think she is and that the real Aubrey Fleming is still in mortal danger.

Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession(ru)
A scientist builds a time machine and accidentally sends his apartment complex manager and a petty burglar to 16th century Moscow, while Tsar Ivan the Terrible travels to 1973.

Driving Miss Daisy(en)
The story of an old Jewish widow named Daisy Werthan and her relationship with her black chauffeur, Hoke. From an initial mere work relationship grew in 25 years a strong friendship between the two very different characters, in a time when those types of relationships were shunned.

Death in Venice(it)
Composer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for health reasons. There, he becomes obsessed with the stunning beauty of an adolescent Polish boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido as Aschenbach.

Sid and Nancy(en)
January 1978. After their success in England, the punk rock band Sex Pistols venture out on their tour of the southern United States. Temperamental bassist Sid Vicious is forced by his band mates to travel without his troubled girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, who will meet him in New York. When the band breaks up and Sid begins his solo career in a hostile city, the turbulent couple definitely falls into the depths of drug addiction.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels(en)
Con artist Lawrence Jamieson is a longtime resident of a luxurious coastal resort, where he enjoys the lavish fruits of his deceptions -- that is, until a competitor, Freddy Benson, shows up. When the new guy's lowbrow tactics impinge on his own sophisticated work and believing him to be the infamous conman 'The Jackal', Lawrence resolves to get rid of him. Confident of his own duplicitous talents, he challenges Freddy to a winner-takes-all competition: whoever swindles their latest mark, American heiress Janet Colgate, out of $50,000 first can stay, while the other must leave town.

Mad Money(en)
Three female employees of the Federal Reserve plot to steal money that is about to be destroyed.

K-9(en)
The extravagant cop Michael Dooley needs some help to fight a drug dealer who has tried to kill him. A "friend" gives him a dog named Jerry Lee (Officer Lewis), who has been trained to smell drugs. With his help, Dooley sets out to put his enemy behind the bars, but Jerry Lee has a personality of his own and works only when he wants to. On the other hand, the dog is quite good at destroying Dooley's car, house and sex-life...
Similar Movies

All Silent Dogs(en)
A young woman is faced with a choice: give up her ability to transform into a dog or face the familial and societal consequences of keeping it.

Hysteria(en)
Legendary actor Patrick McGoohan turns his famous character from THE PRISONER upside down as the psychiatrist in charge of an insane asylum. He has connected his inmates into a group mind where they share each other's psychoses, dreams and sexuality with all the scary and titillating implications imaginable! Like his highly acclaimed cult classic MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH, director Rene Daalders provocative excursion into sci fi-horror filmmaking looks at first glance like a classic grindhouse movie, but it is up to much more. In addition to its operatic mayhem, HYSTERIA is a mind-expanding reflection on individual vs. group consciousness, power, control, and freedom.

Battleship Potemkin(ru)
A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resultant public demonstration, showing support, which brought on a police massacre. The film had an incredible impact on the development of cinema and is a masterful example of montage editing.

La Jetée(fr)
A man is sent back and forth and in and out of time in an experiment that attempts to unravel the fate and the solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world during the aftermath of WW3. The experiment results in him getting caught up in a perpetual reminiscence of past events that are recreated on an airport’s viewing pier.

Contact(en)
A radio astronomer receives the first extraterrestrial radio signal ever picked up on Earth. As the world powers scramble to decipher the message and decide upon a course of action, she must make some difficult decisions between her beliefs, the truth, and reality.

Animal Farm(en)
Animals on a farm lead a revolution against the farmers to put their destiny in their own hands. However this revolution eats their own children and they cannot avoid corruption.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind(en)
After an encounter with UFOs, an electricity linesman feels undeniably drawn to an isolated area in the wilderness where something spectacular is about to happen.

The Last Emperor(en)
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.

October (Ten Days that Shook the World)(ru)
Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution.

The Wild Child(fr)
In 1798, a feral boy is discovered outside the town of Aveyron, France. Diagnosed as mentally impaired, he is relegated to an asylum. A young doctor named Jean Itard becomes convinced that the boy has normal mental capacity, but that his development was hindered by lack of contact with society. He brings the boy home and begins an arduous attempt at education over several years.

Mary Poppins(en)
Mr Banks is looking for a nanny for his two mischievous children and comes across Mary Poppins, an angelic nanny. She not only brings a change in their lives but also spreads happiness.

Human Nature(en)
Obsessive scientist Nathan and his lover, the naturalist Lila, discover Puff: a man born and raised in the wild. As Nathan trains the wild man in the civilized ways of the world, Lila fights to preserve the man’s natural state. In the power struggle that ensues, an unusual love triangle emerges.

Edward Scissorhands(en)
A small suburban town receives a visit from a castaway unfinished science experiment named Edward.

The Experiment(de)
20 volunteers agree to take part in a seemingly well-paid experiment advertised by the university. It is supposed to be about aggressive behavior in an artificial prison situation. A journalist senses a story behind the ad and smuggles himself in among the test subjects. They are randomly divided into prisoners and guards. What seems like a game at the beginning soon turns into bloody seriousness.

The Adventures of Jurassic Pet(en)
An adventurous teenager summons the courage to help a friendly dinosaur to escape from the clutches of a mad scientist that wants to use him for experimentations.

Doctor Zhivago(en)
The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.

Breakfast on Pluto(en)
In the 1970s, a young transgender woman called “Kitten” leaves her small Irish town for London in search of love, acceptance, and her long-lost mother.

Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS(en)
Ilsa, a warden at a Nazi death camp that conducts experiments on prisoners, strives to prove that women can withstand more pain and suffering than men, and therefore should be allowed to fight on the frontlines.

Tears of Kali(de)
Helmed by writer-director Andreas Marschall - and a piece of fiction passing as fact - the direct-to-video horror indie Tears of Kali returns to the early eighties and plunges into a nightmarish scenario wrought when several EST-like groups establish themselves in India. One of the more extreme communes, the Taylor-Eriksson cult, carries its "quest for self-knowledge" to a malevolent end, with numerous group members trapped, tortured, murdered and mutilated. Tears of Kali tells their twisted and disturbing story. Mathieu Carriere, Peter Martell, Cora Chilcott, Vronie Kiefer, and Nuran Celik head the ensemble cast.