Aleksey Balabanov was a troublemaker. At least, that’s how the Russian cultural establishment of the late 1990s would have it. Here was a promising art-house auteur, with a trio of well-regarded films to his name, who was about to make a handbrake turn into multiplex populism. His film Brother (1997) was a domestic smash, almost single-handedly forging the notion of a homegrown...