The Master and Margarita (Season 1)

The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита, 2005) is Vladimir Bortko's series from Mikhail Bulgakov's novel, free to watch online on iFILM. A foreign professor named Woland arrives in 1930s Moscow with a bizarre entourage, and the orderly city starts to come apart — people vanish, heads roll, banknotes turn to scrap paper.

Two stories run side by side. One follows a disgraced writer who burned his manuscript about Pontius Pilate, and his lover Margarita, ready to bargain with the devil himself to get him back. The other is that very manuscript: the Roman prefect's trial of the wandering philosopher Yeshua in ancient Yershalaim. Bortko braids them together almost line by line, keeping both the supernatural and the sharp satire of Soviet life intact.

The cast reads like a roll call of Russian screen greats — Oleg Basilashvili as Woland, Anna Kovalchuk as Margarita, Aleksandr Galibin as the Master, Aleksandr Abdulov as Koroviev, Kirill Lavrov as Pilate and Sergei Bezrukov as Yeshua. The talking cat Behemoth became a pop-culture mascot in its own right. Some call this the most faithful Bulgakov adaptation ever made, others find it too literal — judge for yourself. Stream every episode of The Master and Margarita (2005) online on iFILM.