The first part of this Soviet film, during which you will probably get your fill of sun-dappled impressionistic images long before the director has gotten his, closely resembles Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon, with its broad caricatures of stock silent-movie types (the temperamental prima donna, the masculine matinee idol with a falsetto voice, the oddball writer who sports a Harpo Marx hairdo, etc.). But where Bogdanovich's frivolous moviemakers eventually discover Art, in the form of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, these Russians instead discover Politics, in the form of the October Revolution. The sudden about-face in mood, here, is loaded with surefire sentiment, culminating in the sort of "poetic" and "symbolic" finale which was fresh when Dovzhenko used it, circa 1929. Directed by Nikita Mikhalkov. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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