Soviet Union Showbiz Latest News and Updates

Vladimir Putin has approved a secret deal for Scotch whisky to be smuggled into Russia –avoiding an exports ban.

EXCLUSIVE: Salvador Chacón (Mayans M.C.) has joined the cast of Apple’s for Season 4 in a recurring role. He will portray Gerardo, one of Miles’ (Toby Kebbell) bunkmates on Mars.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Limonero Films, an independent boutique distributor of factual programming and documentaries, is launching a selection of documentaries and factual entertainment series at the Mipcom TV market. The titles are “Women Behind the Wheel,” produced by Dartmouth Films in the U.K., the wildlife titles “Wild Icons of Iberia” and “Heroines of the Savannah,” both by Azor Productions in Spain, “The Baby Makers,” from Mediacorp in Singapore, and “Shepherds of the Earth,” by Guerrilla Films in Finland. In “Women Behind the Wheel,” two 22 year-olds drive 3,500 miles along the Pamir highway to meet the women of Central Asia coping with the changes in their society since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

EXCLUSIVE: Maria Mashkova (McMafia) and Dimiter Marinov (Green Book) have joined the upcoming fourth season of Apple TV+’s space drama series For All Mankind in key recurring roles.

Netflix hit series ‘Inventing Anna’ said she got “exactly what I wanted” after being released from prison to house arrest in a Manhattan apartment. Anna Sorokin, 31, conned her way into New York’s high society by posing as a socialite with a £59 million fortune, culminating in a 2019 prison sentence for swindling US banks, hotels, and friends. Known as Anna Delvey, she collected investment for a planned members-only arts club, but funds were instead used to bankroll her luxury life of five-star hotels, private jet flights, and designer clothes - all inspiring the hit Netflix series starring Julia Garner and Anna Chlumsky.

Oscars.The Russian film academy announced the decision on Monday (September 26) in a statement (via the Guardian), which reads: “The presidium of the Film Academy of Russia has decided not to nominate a national film for the Oscars award of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2022.”According to Variety, several members of Russia’s Oscar nomination committee, including chairman Pavel Tchoukhrai, have resigned following the decision.In a letter published by state news agency Tass, the chairman blamed the Russian film academy for taking an “unilateral decision over the head of the committee” and described it as “unfair and illegal”.This is the first time the country has boycotted the Oscars since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It comes as tensions between Russia and the US rise over the country’s war on Ukraine, which started in February this year.As noted by Variety, some members of Russia’s Oscar committee resigned when the war started earlier this year.

Hong Kong has selected the crime thriller Where the Wind Blows as its official submission to this year’s International Feature Oscar race.

An exceptional and, one might venture, unprecedented group of politicians, diplomats, policy wonks, elected officials and veteran Washington insiders expound on the effectiveness of international military intervention—and the lack thereof—in The Corridors of Power. Israeli director Dror Moreh made one of the great political documentaries of recent times in The Gatekeepers (2012), as well as the excellent The Human Factor (2019), and this time he has assembled an all-star cast of more than 30 political heavyweights including Henry Kissinger, Hilary Clinton, George Shultz, Madeleine Albright and Condoleeza Rice, who in deep, original interviews, help to build a picture of how and why the best intentions can come unglued. The film deserves to be seen in any and all venues by audiences interested in the state of the world and clarity about how we got here.

Trinidad Barleycorn Founded more than 25 years ago by Manuel Catteau, independent French producer and distributor ZED has become over the years a major player in the documentary field. At TV market Unifrance Rendez-vous in Biarritz, ZED revealed to Variety the acquisition of three ambitious history documentary projects, which are available for presales. “Ukraine 1933: Seeds of Hunger,” a documentary by Guillaume Ribot, produced by Les Films Du Poisson for France Télévisions, recalls the tragedy experienced by Ukrainians between 1931 and 1933: the Holodomor, the great famine organized by Stalin to punish those who refused the collectivization of the countryside and communist ideology, resulted in the deaths of more than 4 million of them.

Anne Garrels, longtime foreign correspondent for NPR, died of lung caner on Wednesday, the network announced.

In a 2003 interview, though, Garrels promised she was not a “war junkie.” “I didn’t set out to be a war correspondent,” she said. “The wars kept happening.”Garrels reported from locations including the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Christopher Vourlias The pursuit of justice in the wake of unspeakable war crimes is at the heart of Ukrainian documentary filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s timely new feature, “The Kiev Trial.” Produced by Atoms & Void for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, the film had its world premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. The trailer can be viewed below. Held in January 1946 in the former Soviet Union, the film’s titular trial was among the first court cases to hold Nazis and their collaborators accountable for atrocities committed during World War II — acts that would come to be known as “crimes against humanity” during the historic tribunals held in Nuremberg, Germany.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Just before director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming “Oppenheimer” plants a fixed image of Ted Hall in the popular imagination, along comes Steve James’s sensitive, studious documentary “A Compassionate Spy” to preemptively set any records straight. Unpacking the life and work of the prodigious teenage Manhattan Project physicist who passed key information about the endeavor to the Soviet Union — cuing an adulthood dogged by suspicion and secrecy — the film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling. If the filmmaking is more televisual than in James’s best work, with its flourishes limited to some unnecessary dramatized passages, that should be no impediment to “A Compassionate Spy” commanding a sizable audience on multiple platforms. 

Manori Ravindran International Editor High-profile espionage cases in the post-war period often invoke the grisly fate of the Rosenbergs, the first U.S. citizens to be convicted and executed by electric chair for sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union in peace time. But in the new documentary “A Compassionate Spy,” filmmaker Steve James tells the incredible story of Manhattan Project scientist Ted Hall, who shared classified nuclear secrets with Russia — and got away with it. The Participant and Kartemquin Films-produced documentary, which has its world premiere in Venice on Sept. 2, is one of a number of films at this year’s festival that tackle the topic of nuclear disaster: Projects from Noah Baumbach’s feature adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” through to Oliver Stone’s on-the-nose documentary “Nuclear” all contemplate some aspect of our nuclear past and future.

Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984, when he led a Russian parliamentary delegation to Britain. She hosted him at Chequers, and the tense atmosphere led Gorbachev to tell Thatcher he had no intentions of trying to recruit her to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. She broke into a fit of laughter, in Gorbachev's retelling, and the pair soon found that they could engage in "real political dialogue" despite their opposing views.

Mikhail Gorbachev has died at the age of 91, according to reports.

EJ Panaligan editor Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian politician who served as the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 91, according to the Associated Press. The Central Clinical Hospital in Russia provided a statement to Russian news organizations that Gorbachev died after suffering from an undisclosed, long-term illness. Gorbachev served as the leader of the Soviet Union during its demise in 1991. He resigned on Christmas of that year after spending the last few months in office watching different republics declare independence. His initiatives and reforms led to the end of the Cold War but resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev has died at age 91, social media revived a Pizza Hut commercial from 1998 with the former Soviet Union leader dining out at the American chain in Moscow. But was it really him or a lookalike?Yes, that really was Gorbachev and his granddaughter Anastasia Virganskaya in the ad, which was filmed in December 1997 and aired internationally — but not in Russia — in January 1998.

Former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev has died at age 91, according to Russian news agencies. His cause of death was not immediately released, but Gorbachev's office had said earlier that he was undergoing treatment at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow, according to The Associated Press.Gorbachev served as the eighth and final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, has died at the age of 91, according to local reports.

EXCLUSIVE: Daniel Stern has joined the cast of the Apple TV+ series for Season 4 as a series regular.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who ushered in an era of reform in the Soviet Union and played a role in ending the Cold War with the West, has died, Russian state media and other outlets reported on Tuesday.

Her Majesty The Queen has formally congratulated Ukraine on the country’s 31st anniversary of Independence from the Soviet Union. In her address to the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday 24 August, the 96 year old monarch said: “It gives me great pleasure to send Your Excellency and the people of Ukraine my warmest greetings on the celebration of your Independence Day.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Seasoned Finnish producer Ilkka Matila (“The Eternal Road”, “All the Sins”) of MRP Matila Röhr has signed with Estonia’s Taska Film and locked early support from the Finnish Film Institute and local commercial channel MTV3 for the $2.7m film “Between the Hammer and the Sickle.” Nordisk Film holds Scandinavian rights. To be pitched on Aug. 24 at the Nordic Co-Production Market in Haugesund, Norway, the title will be one of Matila’s most defining projects, a feature which he believes will stay, along the lines of the multi-awarded “Mother of Mine” or “The Eternal Road.” “Between the Hammer and the Sickle” will be one of the first features ever to portray Finland’s illustrious former president Urho Kekkonen. Head of state for nearly 26 years, Kekkonen served as the longest-serving Finnish president from 1956 until 1981 and masterminded his country’s policy of neutrality, keeping at bay the threatening Soviet Union with which Finland shares 800 miles of border.

The Dnipro Kids charity chairman has successfully got the backing of his fellow Perth and Kinross councillors to mark Ukraine Independence Day.

In today’s episode of Bingeworthy, our TV and streaming podcast, co-host Mike DeAngelo launches into one of the best sci-fi series currently on television, “For All Mankind.” The show began as an alternate history version of the 1969 space race in which the Soviet Union beat the United States to the moon, kicking off an increasingly different reality that keeps the space race running towards new goals for decades.

a CNN report of a U.S. offer to exchange American citizens detained in Russia, WNBA star Brittney Griner and former U.S.

Joe Otterson TV Reporter“For All Mankind” has been renewed for Season 4 at Apple.The announcement was made Friday as part of the show’s panel at San Diego Comic-Con. Production on the new season is scheduled to begin in August. Season 3 of the series debuted on the streamer on June 10.“For All Mankind” is an alternative history series that explores what would have happened if the global space race had never ended.

EXCLUSIVE: A little known episode during World War II involving three of the most powerful political figures of the time that could’ve changed the future of the Western world is the subject of a limited series in development at Sony Pictures Television starring and produced by Emmy winner Jharrel Jerome. Thriller drama Night Of the Assassins, based on the New York Times bestseller by Howard Blum, comes from Blum, Terminator 3 director Jonathan Mostow, the Emmy-winning Homeland and 24 duo Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa and their executive Glenn Geller.