Soviet filmmaker V.I. Pudovkin’s last silent film (1928, 144 min.) focuses on a Mongolian uprising against British occupation forces. Like most of the other Pudovkin silents, this shows much more narrative flow and sweep than the contemporary films of Dovzhenko and Eisenstein, but it tends to look a bit more rickety today. One has to turn to Pudovkin’s first sound film, the relatively scarce (but much more interesting) Deserter, to encounter experimentation and poetry that still look radical. (JR)