Several years ago, at a Moscow Fim Festival virtually bereft of local product, I toured Mosfilm, the gigantic government-run studio where most Russian movies were made in the early days of Soviet cinema. The place was a ghost town. State funding had collapsed after perestroika, and film production had dwindled from 400 to a pathetic four movies per year. Lately, things may not be on the up and up — it's whispered that Mafiosi will invest so long as their mistresses get plum roles — but until the industry gets back on its feet, you can see a generous sampling of the best (not to mention most propagandistic) of a century of Russian cinema. Organized by the Russian International Him Festival, the nonprofit Stas Namin Cultural Center in Moscow and our own American Film Institute, the weeklong exhibition includes features, animated films (including a selection from the celebrated animator Fyodor Khitruk) and documentaries, from the early formalists of Soviet cinema through the 1970s and early '80s, to work by a new generation of young directors. Only some of the classics were available for prescreening. Watching Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, one is struck both by the innovative brilliance of their monumental images and montages and (with hindsight) by the political naivete of their revolutionary fervor. "Kill the Jews!" yells a villain in Battleship Potemkin, and is literally squashed by an angrily pro-Semitic proletariat Would that К were so. The festival opens with House of Fools, a new film by Andrei Konchalovsky about a psychiatric hospital near the Russian border with Chechnya, and closes with Eisenstein's /van the Terrible, parts 1 and 2—thrilling viewing, but they play like an endorsement of feudal autocracy. (ArcLight Cinemas; Fri.-Thurs., April 18-24. 323-464-4226)

 Ella Taylor