In The Vanished Empire, 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. The movie doesn’t strain for symbolism, but you might view Sergey, wonderfully played by Alexander Lyapin, as the embodiment of a young generation of Russians recklessly barging into an unforeseeable future. He is the ringleader of a group of three close friends, including Kostya (Ivan Kupreyenko), the bass player in a local rock band, and the earnest, geeky Stepan (Yegor Baranovsky), who share the usual excruciating postadolescent rites of passage.

This wise, elegiac film embraces a view of history that is more far-reaching than the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. There is an extraordinary coda, set three decades later, in which two of the three friends (one of whom remains unseen) meet accidentally in an airport. Without saying much, they acknowledge all that was lost in those years of unimaginable change. —Stephen Holden, New York Times (100 min, Kino International Films)

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Written by Sergey Rokotov, Evgeny Nikishov. Photographed by Shandor Berkeshi. With Alexander Lyapin, Lidiya Milyuzina, Ivan Kupreyenko, Yegor Baranovsky.