Translating terrorism is tricky. Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student is an adaptation of a play by the German writer Marius von Mayenburg which was staged in London two years ago under its original title, Martyr. One exchange in this story (which is set in and around a school) references what might happen if Christian extremists pursued their beliefs with a fervour we associate more with militant Islam. The two concepts don’t quite combine in English as they did in Russian, which used the title (M)Uchennik, a play on the two words which caught the associations of both.

Serebrennikov is known in his homeland as much as a stage director as for his film work – The Student is his sixth feature, and premiered at Cannes last year – and he first staged the play at the theatre which he runs in Moscow (casting partly repeats). He has not only adapted the work for screen, but clearly shaped the German original into a Russian context, most notably that of the Orthodox religion. It gives a sharp accent to an issue – the relation between state and Church, of concurrent official ideologies – that has become particularly acute in Russia this century.

Exact references, to both Old and New Testament, appear as screen titles 

All of which makes the film’s teenage protagonist Venya (Pyotr Skvortsov, sulkily intense, main picture) something of a contradiction. His adolescent rebellion, against both his mother and the school authorities, can’t be dismissed in the usual way because his protests are on fundamentalist religious grounds, and he cites the Bible, chapter and verse, to prove his points (exact references, to both Old and New Testament, appear as screen titles).

His single mother (Julia Aug), perpetually exhausted and working in three jobs, clearly loves him, but doesn’t have a clue what to do with a son who’s become practically a stranger (a normal teenager, in her book, would be “collecting stamps and jerking off all the time”). More enterprising is the approach taken by the school’s progressive biology teacher Elena (Victoria Isakova, giving a highly intelligent performance; pictured, below, left, with Julia Aug, right), who sees Venya’s stubbornness as some sort of cry for help, and initially tries to approach him more sympathetically.

But the dynamic between the two moves towards conflict. When she teaches sex education – including information about homosexuality, another highly sensitive issue in Russia these days – he strips naked and rampages around the classroom, meeting her explanations about contraception with fire-and-brimstone injunctions to “be fruitful and replenish the earth”. Lessons about Darwinism are countered by his dressing in a guerrilla costume and preaching creationism.

Even the priest who is attached to the school is defeated by the phenomenon, his attempts to co-opt the teenager into the official structures of religion countered by accusations about the Church’s venality, its attachment to palaces and Mercedes rather than its duty to “bring fire to the earth”. The things notably lacking in Venya’s worldview, however, are charity and love, highlighted particularly in his interaction with Grisha (Alexander Gorchilin, pictured below with Skvortsov), the bullied outcast of the class who latches on to his charismatic contemporary for his own reasons.

Venya sees Grisha not as a friend but almost as a disciple (which was, in fact, an alternative title for the film). Grisha has one leg shorter than the other, so Venya doesn’t hesitate to call him a cripple (Christ, we are reminded, sought out the cripples and the outcasts). Trying to extend the shorter leg becomes something of a ritual test of faith, as Venya intones “Grow, leg” over his companion’s half-naked torso; for the other boy, hands and half-naked torsos hint at something else altogether. The disillusionment will be painful.

Scenes like that reveal that The Student has plenty of very dark comedy, although you’d need an audience on the right wavelength to extract it (and some may well be lost in translation). The antics of the school’s headmistress and some of her proteges are conveyed with a pronounced degree of satire. Serebrennikov’s first significant feature, Playing the Victim, from a decade ago, another adaptation from the stage, also had a central figure who didn’t fit into the world around him, and was also gloriously rich in black comedy – but the mood in his new work is somehow darker, more desperate.

It’s felt especially in a very uneasy score from composer Ilya Demutsky, which uses strained, sometimes atonal string writing to intersperse episodes and set the emotional tone (it’s much more nuanced than repeated closing use of Slovenian heavy-metallers Laibach’s anthem “God Is God”). There’s something somehow detached to Vladislav Opelyants’ cinematography, too, working largely with long shots and controlling colour and light impeccably. Filmed in Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave on the Baltic, there’s virtually nothing that identifies the location as specifically Russian – rather it’s a somehow generalised small-town atmosphere, visually interchangeable perhaps for Scandinavia or other coastal northern climes.

That quality – of being very Russian in spirit, while presenting an environment that in itself is not distinctly Russian at all – could not help but recall Andrei Zvyagintsev, especially his first film, The Return. And comparisons for The Student are also appropriate with Zvyagintsev’s latest, Leviathan. Both films are saying that something is somehow very much not right in the society in which they are set, but whereas Leviathan unfolded on an almost epic scale, Serebrennikov’s film speaks in a more minor key, its dramatic action more muted (and its script, arguably, on the wordy side). The Student doesn’t make wide assertions about morality, instead it probes – teases, even – around issues of values (religion being, after all, among the deepest of all). It’s an uneasy film, one that leaves a somehow bitter taste behind.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Student

This must be the most depressing exhibition I have ever seen. Dedicated to the leaders of the Russian Revolution, the first room features official portraits by Isaak Brodsky of Lenin and Stalin plus drawings and models of Lenin’s vast mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square.

Late January, and the soul longs for winter's end. Which is why Rimsky-Korsakov's bittersweet fairy story about the fragile daughter of Spring and Frost whose heart will melt when she discovers true love, allowing the sun to bring back warmth to earth, is so apt. Unfortunately the time of year is also one for striking singers down, so we missed two of the principals on Saturday night.

New Year’s Eve has its rituals and, in the Russian-speaking world, watching the 1976 film The Irony of Fate is core to ringing out the old and ringing in the new. A television staple, it has the seasonal status of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Little Shop on the Corner and White Christmas. First seen in Russian homes as a three-hour, two-part small-screen production on the first day of 1976, it was subsequently edited and shown in cinemas.

This Chekhov-intensive year comes to a muted climax with a rare sighting of Wild Honey. Michael Frayn's reappraisal of the Russian master's untitled early text is more commonly known as Platonov. There was a scorching production of the play this summer at the National as part of a Young Chekhov trilogy. A separate Broadway Platonov, adapted by Andrew Upton under the title The Present and starring his wife Cate Blanchett, begins previews next week.

The Russian director Alexander Sokurov has never been afraid of tackling weighty, often philosophical issues head on, and his latest film Francofonia is as pioneering – and, some might say, unnecessarily uncompromising – as ever. It’s nothing less than a meditation on civilisation, its potential for preservation or destruction, and history, seen through the prism of Paris's Louvre. Stretching, and evading, the conventions of both documentary and fiction, it’s perhaps best considered as an art project in itself.

Sokurov’s cinematic fascination with the museum as a concept stretches back to his remarkable 2002 Russian Ark, a single-take engagement, at just over an hour and a half, with 300 years of Russian history that was filmed in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Technically ground-breaking, it brought to the fore the interrelationship between the museum as a repository of history, and as a space in itself, in which history unfolds. (Interestingly, it seems to have spawned a new sub-species of cinema – from Johannes Holzhausen’s The Great Museum to Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery – investigating the museum as an entity in itself, with all its various accretions of cultural and human history.)

It feels too much like a metaphor imposed from outside

The Louvre duly followed the Hermitage in opening its doors, developing the programme “Louvre Invites Filmmakers” which sought “unusual, non-institutional views of the building, the collections, and the institution itself”, which made Sokurov’s appearance there completely natural. Francofonia is certainly “non-institutional”, mixing as it does an eclectic variety of elements. Its most direct level involves dramatic reconstruction of the life of the Louvre during wartime German occupation of Paris, and a story concentrating on the relationship between its then director, Jacques Jaujard (played here by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), and the German officer Count Wolff Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath) who was the Nazi cultural overseer for France.

Beginning as formal, distant players on opposing sides, these two highly cultured contemporaries somehow become united by a shared determination to secure the Louvre’s collection. Shortly before the outbreak of war, everything except some sculpture had been evacuated into storage in chateaux cellars around France, and ultimately it was in no small part Metternich’s achievement that so little was removed as trophy plunder to Germany.Those two historical figures, living in their clearly defined moment, are joined by another couple, less directly but somehow more organically connected to locus. Stalking the museum’s halls Sokurov gives us the memorable pairing of the Emperor Napoleon (Vincent Nemeth) – responsible, of course, for much of the enlargement of the Louvre’s collection, as well as its establishment as a public gallery – intoning periodically “C’est moi”; and the tricolour personification of France herself, Marianne (Johanna Korthals Altes), visually appropriated from Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, with her chant of Liberté, égalité, fraternité. In one scene, the two of them ponder the Mona Lisa: not the least advantage of having unfettered, after-hours access to a great space like this is the chance to see it without any other visitors. (Pictured below left: Johanna Korthals Altes, Vincent Nemeth.)

As the film’s narrator, Sokurov is himself – literally – caught up in both strands: he is equally observer, the eye of the camera if you like, and participant, engaged in dialogue with the characters, as well as with the space itself, the works in its collection, and its history. He creates the story that tells us how it all started, how the building grew and its galleries developed, all illustrated through depictions of that process in works of art from the collection itself.

He also weaves in a third truly varied element, best described as philosophical meditation, which is by some distance the hardest thing to describe about Francofonia. It ranges from invocations to the icons of Sokurov’s own cultural world such as Tolstoy and Chekhov, to a digression on the very different wartime fate of the director’s home city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad. The wartime devastation wrought by the Nazis on their Eastern front is set against the apparent tranquillity – although it is very much a selective tranquillity, from which many of the actualities of the time (most acutely, the fate of France’s Jewish population) have been banished – with which Paris engaged with her occupiers.

And behind that is Sokurov’s most abstract concern of all, his meditation on the fragility of civilisation – our culture, in the broadest sense – in history. To convey this he introduces himself in his everyday life: we see the director in his study, engaged in a film project, as well as in skype conversations with a friend, the captain of an ocean-going container ship that is transporting, among other things, items from a museum collection, through a perilously stormy sea.

Literally, as we see huge waves break over the bow of the vessel, this cultural freight is at risk (it’s symbolically linked to Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, too). It’s a rich mix, but this last element is somehow the least persuasive: or rather, it demands a total commitment, on Sokurov’s terms alone, which viewers may not be ready to make. It feels too much like a metaphor imposed from outside on the structure of an already heterogenous film, making it solipsistic almost to the point of pretension.

The variety of technical forms that Sokurov and his cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel employ is every bit as diverse, but the result there is endlessly fascinating: the textures and hues, patinaed or distressed with age, sound strips and other elements left visible – it all comprises a work of art in itself. It’s a visually sombre film, combining pellucid black and white archive footage of Paris of the period with human encounters filmed in faded, treated colours. Murat Kabadokov’s score is, if anything, even more impressive: it rumbles richly throughout the film before dominating its final minutes – there are no end-credits where we would expect them – with a demonic riff on the Soviet (now Russian, too) national anthem. Mannerism seems the right term: if on the visual and audio side, Francofonia’s experiments in that direction never tire, the same cannot always be said of the content. A curio, albeit a fascinating one.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Francofonia

What a relief to find Semyon Bychkov back on romantic terra firma after his slow-motion Mozart at the Royal Opera (performances speeded up somewhat, I'm told, after a sticky first night). On his own, dark-earth terms, there's no-one to touch him for nuanced phrasing, strength of purpose and the devoted responsiveness he wins from the BBC Symphony Orchestra - foot-stamping its approval at the end, a rarity - in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.

Stravinsky's music, chameleonic yet always itself, offers so many lines of thought. One struck me immediately with the descending, even harp notes and tender, veiled strings at the start of his 1947 ballet Orpheus last night: the inexorable beat of time is so often pitted against an expressive, human voice. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who started out as a rhythm and textures man, now gets the humanity too.

Ralph Fiennes has long felt at home in the Russian repertoire, whether onstage in Fathers and Sons near the start of his career or, in 1997, taking the Almeida's Ivanov to Moscow as the first UK company to bring Chekhov home, as it were.

Tough love doesn’t get much tougher. Ukrainian priest Gennadiy Mokhnenko has spent two decades trying to keep children off the streets, and away from drugs, in his hometown Mariupol, using methods that elsewhere in the world would count as vigilante. For him radical intervention was the only way of responding to the social breakup of the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse brought his society to a profound low point, both psychologically and economically, while those nominally in power were conspicuous by their inaction, or worse. He's been doing it ever since.