Here’s a new digital restoration of one of the most expensive and spectacular Soviet films ever made! Sergei Bondarchuk’s lavish adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s tome cost the equivalent of 60-70 million 2019 dollars and employed 120,000 soldiers as extras in its battle scenes. Winner of the 1969 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the movie skillfully mixes the epic and the intimate, with sensitive performances and cinematic poetry. A portrait of Russia at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the movie centers on a love triangle involving Pierre Bezukhov, an awkward intellectual (played by Bondarchuk himself), Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, a dashing soldier, and Countess Natasha Rostova, a beautiful but reckless young woman. The seven-hour film will be shown in four parts over the next four weekends.“The definitive epic of all time. . . You are never, ever going to see anything to equal it.” –Roger Ebert.

The third part of Bondarchuk’s seven-hour epic consists almost entirely of the Battle of Borodino. Tens of thousands of real soldiers from the Soviet army were enlisted to re-create this pivotal moment in Napoleon’s ill-fated 1812 invasion of Russia. The Chicago Tribune proclaimed this pre-CGI spectacle “beyond question, the cinema’s best and most elaborate battle sequence.” Subtitles. 81 min.