Ivan the Terrible Part II: The Boyars’ Plot

This is something trippy. Sergei Eisenstein took his success from the first part of the intended trilogy about the life of the first Tsar of the Russias, that success based largely on Stalin’s approval, and went even further into formalism with the sequel. The second entry famously angered Stalin, seeing in it a critique of his own rule, and it was suppressed for more than a decade until after both Stalin’s and Eisenstein’s deaths. I suspect that Stalin also didn’t like the film because it’s...