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This letter is part of "Behind the Celluloid Curtain," a series of correspondences between Scout Tafoya and Veronika Ferdman on the topic of Soviet cinema, with each series organized around a theme. This particular series focuses on love in a time of discontent.Dear Scout,Those Soviets are really unlucky in love, aren’t they? At any period of time and age—from the star-crossed adult lovers of the 1800s of The Lady with the Dog to the summer campers in their early to mid-teens in One Hundred Days After Childhood (for which director Sergei Solovyov won the Silver Bear fat the Berlinale in 1975)—love has never saved anyone, or cleared the cobwebs out of eyes and minds. Not when there are such big pressures—whether the general malaise brought on by social misalignment of July Rain and Lady with the Dog, or the struggle to find the value and...

'And Then There Were None' movie with Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, June Duprez, Louis Hayward and Roland Young. 'And Then There Were None' movie remake to be directed by Oscar nominee Morten Tyldum One of the best-known Agatha Christie novels, And Then There Were None will be getting another big-screen transfer. 20th Century Fox has acquired the movie rights to the literary suspense thriller first published in the U.K. (as Ten Little Niggers) in 1939. Morten Tyldum, this year's Best Director Academy Award nominee for The Imitation Game, is reportedly set to direct. The source for this story is Deadline.com, which adds that Tyldum himself “helped hone the pitch” for the acquisition while Eric Heisserer (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010, The Thing 2011) will handle the screenplay adaptation. And Then There Were None is supposed to have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, thus holding the...

Toronto -- Veteran Russian director Sergey Solovyev's "Anna Karenina," a film adaptation of the Leo Tolstoy novel, received its North American premiere Thursday night at the KinoArt Festival in Toronto.

The veteran director and "Karenina" lead Tatyana Drubich were on hand for Toronto's homage to Russian film, which includes two other Solovyev pics, the 80's cult-classic film "Assa" and its long-awaited sequel "Assa 2."

KinoArt founder and executive director Alla-Ani Poliakova said the festival aims to "chronicle the evolution of Russian films, past and present," by bringing that country's feature films, documentaries and shorts to North America.

Also unspooling in Toronto is Vladimir Bortko's $20 million period drama "Taras Bulba" from Russian studo Central Partnership, and a North American premiere for Liza Listova's "Metro," part of a Soviet Empire documentary cycle that in its latest installment chronicles the 1930s Stalin-era construction of the Moscow subway system.

Listova said she used animation,...