The film is a broad satire of American ignorance of the Soviet Union. The naive American, Mr. John West, played by Porfori Podobed as a Harold Lloyd type (complete with enormous round glasses), is a YMCA president who is planning a trip to the newly founded Soviet Union to spread the idea of the YMCA. His wife, Madge, is worried that Russia is full of savage Bolsheviks who wear primitive rags and fur for clothing, as depicted in American magazines....

Gregor is a young soldier entering Germany with the victorious Soviet troops at the end of WWII. But he is also the child of left-wing Germans who fled from Hitler and spent the war in the Soviet Union. As a result, his return to Germany is ambivalent; he finds he is a stranger in his own land. Film critics rank Konrad Wolf's most autobiographical film among the 100 Most Significant German Films of all time. As they enter Germany, Gregor begins to...

A cinematic love letter to a unique moment in the lives of the Soviet youth, directed by celebrated Russian filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov.

This dawn-to-dusk view of the Soviet Union offers a montage of urban Russian life, showing the people of the city at work and at play Considered one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era.

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth? This...

The world came close to annihilation during the Cold War - a sobering fact known to few besides the warriors engaged in the forty-six-year conflict. In this riveting new history, former U.S. Navy diver and fast-attack submariner W. Craig Reed provides a thrilling narrative of the tense inderwater dramas and covert espionage operations that brought the United States and the former U.S.S.R. to the brink of nuclear war on several occasions. Riveting...

An award-winning documentary about the original performer-president's role of a lifetime. Teasing apart the spectacle at the heart of finger-on-the-button global diplomacy, the film follows Ronald Reagan's rivalry with charismatic Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Chock full of wit and political irony, and told solely through 1980s network news and videotapes created by the Reagan administration itself, THE REAGAN SHOW explores Reagan's made-for-TV...

October: Ten Days That Shook the World is a 1927 Soviet silent propaganda film by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, sometimes referred to as October. It is a film epic about the 1917 October Revolution and Revolution in Petrograd. The title is taken from John Reed's book on the Revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World. The film was commissioned by the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR to commemorate the 10th anniversary...

At the height of the Cold War, two secretaries are pulled out of the typing pool at the CIA and given the assignment of a lifetime. Their mission: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR, where no one dare publish it, and help Pasternak's magnum opus make its way into print around the world. Glamorous and sophisticated Sally Forrester is a seasoned spy who has honed her gift for deceit all over the world--using her magnetism and charm to pry secrets...

In 1927, Eisenstein and Pudovkin were both assigned to make films commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. The results, October and The end of St. Petersburg, are two of the unforgettable masterpieces of epic filmmaking. Pudovkin's film, the more intensely dramatic and personal of the two, opens on a farm where a peasant must stay in the field and plow as his wife dies in childbirth. Trudging to the city to seek work, he is forced...