Weekend Movie Forecast: Brüno or Humpday

Set mostly in Moscow in the 1970s, Vanished Empire views the sunset of the Soviet Union through the eyes of rebellious teenage lovers. Stephen Holden at the Times calls it a "wise, elegiac film... [Director Karen] Shakhnazarov, a prolific and under-recognized Russian filmmaker with a surrealist touch, views the collapse of the Soviet Union as an inevitable conflation of the younger generation’s natural impulse to reject the past and of the seductive power of a monolithic pop culture that can seep through the most rigidly patrolled borders."