Another Russian road movie of 2023, this time documentary. Without unnecessary prefaces, which are absolutely not necessary here, we immediately proceed to the essence of this release. Three unemployed slackers, as they position themselves - about the age of 30 (although the main character admits in one episode that he is 35), decide to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok exclusively by train. The goals of travel on the one hand are typical for a reflective creative capital hangout - to find yourself, rethink values, etc., on the other hand - are common for any traveler: to see how people live, to visit distant relatives. However, one look at the overall timing of the work - 1 hour of screen time exactly - is enough to doubt that the guys will be able to rethink at least something there, not to mention the fact that it is interesting to show different corners of our vast country - in fact, for what you get acquainted with this pseudo-documentary. That's how it works. There is nothing at all significant in the Short Train, and its artistic and cognitive value frankly tends to zero. Some scattered footage of random streets and corners, which even a “gallop through Europe” is difficult to call. Somewhere they asked for street basketball to play, somewhere they scared the ninety-two-year-old grandfather with stupid questions, somewhere they dived into the hole, somewhere they “dropped” the disliked city and its inhabitants. Of course, the overall picture of these fragments does not add up. As for the semantic load, how can we not remember comrade “Goblin” Puchkov and his comparison of such “creativity” of modern “youth” with the activities of the same Vasily Shukshin, who, even as a thirty-year-old novice actor, already wrote his famous Altai stories – cases from life that were interesting to everyone, because they contained original relevant stories and relevant morality. What about today’s boys and girls? How can they share their experiences? How did you sit all day on the social network, and then clamped in the night alley? What other drug have you tried? So the guys from the reviewed novelty simply have nothing to say to the viewer. If Lermontov died at the age of 26, having already presented all his immortal works to the world, if Sholokhov wrote Quiet Don at the age of 23, then these characters of 30 and 35 years of age cannot connect two words; they simply do not have enough vocabulary to express their thoughts. Add here an ordinary personal family story of one of the characters, which no one else needs (since every family has such a pond), and a nauseating background soundtrack, and you can, in principle, end the review. The assessment here is obvious.