steve belt’s review published on Letterboxd:
9th Company, concerning a squad of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan during the 1980s war, is essentially a Russian version of Oliver Stone's "Platoon". There are no politics discussed, but just a story about young men caught up in an impossible, horrific situation and trying to come out the other side in one piece. The final battle scene, in which a few Soviet soldiers hold the line against what appear to be about 10,000 Mujahadeen fighters, is viscerally terrifying and deserves comparison with similar sequences in Saving Private Ryan and Full Metal Jacket. This is a genuine classic of the genre, not to be missed.