Soviet Union Showbiz Latest News and Updates

Naman Ramachandran British actor and comedian Steve Coogan is all set to channel his inner Peter Sellers. The “Alan Partridge” star will play multiple roles as the lead in the London stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 political satire film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” being adapted by “Veep” creator Armando Iannucci.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In my opinion, the two greatest directors to emerge from the nexus of international cinema in the 1990s were both Scandinavian. One of them, Lars von Trier, became quite famous, for reasons both good and bad.

Edward Hume, a prolific TV writer who created or developed such 1970s episodic crime classics as The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon and Barnaby Jones, and was Emmy-nominated for the startlingly realistic, much-watched 1983 nuclear holocaust drama The Day After, has died. He was 87.

Let’s run this again for the uninitiated: Apple TV+’s acclaimed, hit space drama “For All Mankind” is a historical “what if” about the 1960s space race and spotlights the high-stakes lives of astronauts and their families. The series dramatizes an alternate history depicting “what would have happened if the global space race had never ended” after the Soviet Union succeeded in the first crewed Moon landing ahead of the United States.

McKinley Franklin editor Edward Hume, the Emmy-nominated writer of “The Day After” and creator of “The Streets of San Francisco,” has died, his rep confirmed to Variety. He was 87. Hume was known for his work on the critically acclaimed, 1983 sci-fi TV movie “The Day After,” which was nominated for a total of 10 Emmys and won two.

Gene Maddaus Senior Media Writer Chris Keyser, a tuxedoed 23-year-old, stood at a lectern at the Oxford Union to defend the moral superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union. It was 1984. Keyser, now a leader of the Writers Guild of America strike, was then a Harvard Law student.

Legendary stage and screen actor John Cairney has died aged 93.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In out-there Estonian comedy “The Invisible Fight,” a clueless Russian border guard somehow escapes a surprise attack by three formidable Chinese action figures — gravity-defying kung fu warriors who swoop in out of nowhere, blasting Black Sabbath on their bright red boombox — so he does what anyone in his position would do: He resolves to become an Orthodox monk. Huh? “I guess God has other plans for you,” a less-fortunate comrade wheezes with his dying breath, setting up one of the oddest plots audiences are likely to find on the art-house circuit this year.

There’s a new trailer for World on Fire, the Masterpiece war drama from The A Word’s Peter Bowker that bows Sunday, October 15, on PBS.

Ukrainian Independence Day is just around the corner and Manchester will be celebrating the day by giving the public a wide range of cultural aspects to try out

Estonia has selected the Sundance prize-winning doc Smoke Sauna Sisterhood as its entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 2024 Oscars.

The Killers are apologizing.

LevelK has boarded “The Invisible Fight,” Estonian director Rainer Sarnet’s kung fu comedy set in an Orthodox monastery in the former Soviet Union. The film world premieres Aug. 11 in the main competition of the Locarno Film Festival.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Dan Ackerman, editor in chief of tech news site Gizmodo, alleges Apple TV+ film “Tetris” illegally copied from his book on the popular video game, in a lawsuit he filed seeking at least $4.8 million in damages from Apple and others. Ackerman’s “The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World,” published in 2016, is about the game’s origins in the former Soviet Union and the fight for its global licensing rights. The lawsuit touted the book as a “literary masterpiece” and described it as “in the style of Cold War spy thriller.” According to the lawsuit, Ackerman sent a pre-publication copy of the book to the Tetris Co.

The Order of Succession is something that cannot be altered by personal preference. While the British royals understand this, it would seem that one foreign country had not grasped this as they made a rather strange offer to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1994. Huge socio-political change in the country at the time prompted them to ask the late Queen's youngest son, Prince Edward, to serve as their head of state.The unusual offer was called "charming" but had to be sensibly declined by Buckingham Palace.

Christopher Vourlias Estonia’s Taska Film, the production company behind local box-office hits such as medieval crime thriller “Melchior the Apothecary,” hits Locarno’s Match Me! industry sessions with a slate that includes Jaak Kilmi’s “Dirt in Your Face,” a coming-of-age rock drama set in the twilight of the Soviet Union backed in part by Apollo, the largest cinema chain in the Baltic region. The film follows 17-year-old Mihkel and his band as they go on a journey full of alcohol, protest and music to impress a Western producer visiting a rock festival in 1980s Soviet Estonia.

Veteran filmmaker Oliver Stone has voiced his regret for voting for President Joe Biden, saying he fears the US leader may take America into World War 3.

Sophia Scorziello editor Josephine Chaplin, actor and daughter of Charlie Chaplin, has died. She was 74. Chaplin died on July 13 in Paris, according to an announcement from her family. During her career, she starred in a number of foreign films. In 1972 she was featured in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s award-winning film “The Canterbury Tales” and Richard Balducci’s “L’odeur des fauves.” The same year, she also starred alongside Laurence Harvey in Menahem Golan’s 1972 drama “Escape to the Sun” about a group of people attempting to flee the Soviet Union. In 1974, Chaplin starred as Martine Leduc in Georges Franju’s European crime-thriller “Shadowman” alongside Gayle Hunnicutt and Jacques Champreux. The film follows the Man Without a Face, a criminal attempting to find the elusive treasures of the Knights Templar. Chaplin then reprised her role as Martine in the subsequent French mini-series “The Man Without a Face,” an extended eight-episode version of Franju’s film.

Oppenheimer,” a brainy, brassy yet, on the whole, majestic historical biopic-thriller about the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Naman Ramachandran Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 political satire film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” is being adapted as a stage production for London’s West End by “Veep” creator Armando Iannucci. In the film, where Peter Sellers plays several roles, an insane American general orders a bombing attack on the Soviet Union, triggering a path to nuclear holocaust that a war room full of politicians and generals frantically tries to stop. It was released in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Iannucci is one of the U.K.’s foremost political satirists who scored an Oscar nomination for “In the Loop,” a BAFTA nomination for “The Death of Stalin” and a BAFTA win for “The Thick of It,” all considered amongst the best British political satires of all time. He will adapt “Dr. Strangelove” alongside Sean Foley, known for several West End productions including the Olivier nominated “The Ladykillers,” a stage adaptation of the 1955 comedy film, and “I Can’t Sing! The X Factor Musical.”

Stanley Kubrick’s great apocalyptic Cold War comedy Dr Strangelove is being brought to the stage by Armando Iannucci, best known for more recent shows Veep and Avenue Five. 

The Chernobyl disaster is regarded as the world's worst-ever civil nuclear incident.

Stephen Rodrick Some things are best in small doses. Cheesecake and Ketamine come to mind. The more-is-not-necessarily-better conundrum confronts the creators of “Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story,” a Vice News documentary about the punk folk band Gogol Bordello and Eugene Hütz, the band’s charismatic lead singer. Hütz also doubles as a Ukrainian activist/raconteur/resident deep thinker. He can be a lot. Audiences’ appreciation of the doc will depend on their patience with Hütz, a man whose intentions are good even if his volume is always set to 11.  Directors Nate Pommer and Eric Weinrib have the difficult task of trying to explain a 24-year-old cult band in 99 minutes. It is very much an immigrant story. There’s an early shot of Hütz swaggering onstage with the band — a mélange of violinists, drummers and guitarists — and baptizing the audience with his beer.

Nick Holdsworth Eugene Hütz, founder and frontman with U.S. gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, would likely to have ended up a painter wearing “dirty pants and long hair” had his parents not left the Soviet Union when he was 16. “I would probably have become a painter, as there was more of a path paved in that in my family,” he says. “I was drawing most of my childhood and my uncle – Mikhail Mykolayev – is a pretty well-known painter who still lives in Kyiv.” Fresh from playing a brief, impromptu solo guitar gig at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, following the international premiere of a new documentary about the band, “Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story,” Hütz fits the bill, although his khaki cargo pants are not paint spattered.

Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher have a love story made for Hollywood.From growing up on different sides of the world, to both being cast together in their first major television show, drifting apart and then reuniting and falling in love years later, you couldn't script things much better for the happy couple and parents of two.«I mean, how do you not love him, right?» Kunis gushed to ET about her husband at the premiere in February 2015. «He's so great.»And the pair are so in sync, they even have fun mocking tabloid headlines speculating about their marriage.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Assel Aushakimova’s dark comedy about journalism in Kazakhstan “Bikechess” has won the Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Works in Progress award, which runs as part of the festival’s industry section, Eastern Promises. The section is focused on feature film projects from Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa. The Kazakh film follows Dina, who works as a journalist for the national television station. The stories she is asked to report on are becoming increasingly absurd and full of praise for the government. Her love life is limited to a few secret meetings with her married camera­man. Dina looks after her young sis­ter, a lesbian activist, who regularly finds herself in trouble with the au­thorities.

“There’s something I have to tell you:” As an 18-year-old undergraduate at Harvard, Ted Hall was recruited to help Robert Oppenheimer and his team develop a weapon that would alter the course of human history. When the Atomic Bomb was detonated twice the following year, over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hall did not share in his colleagues’ enthusiasm for the Manhattan Project.

Margaret Brennan recently was among a small number of reporters who traveled with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China, a trip designed to turn down the temperature on simmering tensions with Beijing.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival’s Eastern Promises industry platform has unveiled 27 film projects that will be showcased during its Works in Progress, Works in Development – Feature Launch and First Cut+ Works in Progress presentations. The most promising projects, selected by international juries, will receive awards with a total value of 115,000 EUR.  The showcasing of projects to industry professionals will take place in Karlovy Vary, during this year’s KVIFF Industry Days on July 3 (Works in Progress and Works in Development – Feature Launch) and July 4 (First Cut+ Works in Progress). For Works in Progress, 11 fiction and documentary feature films in the late stage of production or post-production from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa have been selected.

Bob Verini Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine Jack Ryan or Jason Bourne as a cranky, retired septuagenarian, body all achin’ and racked with pain after a lifetime of dangerous missions. Now imagine he gets the call that he’s got to get back in the game, or else risk the lives of himself and everyone he loves. This is the intriguing, often heart-stopping premise of “The Old Man,” which examines the art of espionage in our post-Cold War world and its impact on those who conduct it. Based on a novel by thriller master Thomas Perry, the seven-part first season of the FX series leaps back and forth in time, from the Soviet Union’s war on Afghanistan in the 1980s to the deadly legacy of that conflict in the present day.