A very late silent picture, shot in 1935 and released the following year, V. Zhuravlev’s rarely screened Soviet SF feature about a flight to the moon is more accurate than Fritz Lang’s 1928 Woman in the Moon (in which one character runs around the lunar surface without a space helmet, carrying a dowser’s wand in search of gold). But its charm today lies mostly in its more archaic aspectsthe vaguely futurist cityscape at the beginning, the golly-gee boy inventor who joins the flight, the clunky handling of gravity (the loss of which enables the characters to leap about like grasshoppers). Neither film compares favorably to the English feature Things to Come (1936), but this remains an intriguing period piece. 60 min. (JR)