Yesterday, AT was kind enough to publish the first installment of my submission about anti-Communist movies that were produced by Hollywood. For the second installment, we set the cutoff point at the year 2000, and will review anti-Communist movies with Hollywood connections produced since then.

Things have changed in the world of anti-Communist movies since 2000. On the one hand, the Iron Curtain has fallen, and much more has become public, things of which we were previously only dimly aware. This is why there has been a such a spate of anti-Communist movies from Russia and Eastern Europe.

So we now have much more material to work with. But on the other hand, as these events recede into the past, so do our memories of them. The American public, perhaps indoctrinated into Leftism by America’s educational establishment, is not as interested in anti-Communist themes as it used to be. This can be measured by the  of drop-off of interest in anti-Communist movies produced by the big Hollywood studios. In these seventeen movies reviewed here that were produced since 2000, only three were produced even in part by big Hollywood studios; the other fourteen were filmed by small producers.

Before Night Falls (2000): Based on the autobiography of the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. Born in 1942, Arenas became a dissident and critic of Fidel Castro during the 1960s. As if that weren’t bad enough, Arenas was also gay and in Castro’s Cuba. During the 1970s he was in and out of jail many times, before arriving in the USA in the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, dying in New York City in 1990 of AIDS. Played by Johnny Depp.

Team America World Police (2004): This comedy movie is almost a cartoon, in that all of its characters are animated puppets. A commando team of these puppets, two of them female, calling itself Team America, is formed to take on the world’s terrorists. After demolishing much of Paris to kill terrorists, and incidentally demolishing the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower in the process, Team America goes to North Korea to take out Kim Jong-il. This is an over-the-top, satirical comedy, and does a great job portraying the world’s terrorists as supported by Communist governments. WARNING: This movie is filled with coarse, barnyard language, and sexual situations, including a scene of puppet pornography. (!)

The Lost City (2005): In late-1950s Havana, a well-to-do family is caught up in the death throes of the Batista regime, with some of its members for Batista, others deciding they can live with Castro. Then Castro comes to power, and they all discover what real oppression is. Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, and Bill Murray star in this one.

Rambo IV (2008): Rambo fights more Commies in Burma.

Mao’s Last Dancer (2009): During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a boy showing dancing prowess is recruited to study dance at the dance academy of Chiang Ching (Mao’s would-be “artistic,” ex-showgirl harridan wife). Years later, during the 1980s, he has become an accomplished dancer, and during a cultural exchange tour of the USA, realizes how unfree he is to pursue his art in China, and wants to defect to the USA, under the sponsorship of the Houston Ballet.

The Long Walk (????): Nine Polish POWs captured during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland (as Adolf Hitler’s partner in crime) escape being murdered in the Katyn Forest by the NKVD, and end up in a Siberian Gulag. From there they escape and walk 4,000 miles across the Gobi Desert through Tibet, to reach India and freedom. Based on the book of the same title by Slavomir Rawicz, purported to be a true story. This reviewer is certain that a movie under this title was made of this story, but could find no reference to it. However, the story was filmed again (?) in the 2010 remake (?), called...

The Way Back: (2010 remake (?) of The Long Walk) Starring Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess.

Under Jakob’s Ladder (2011): Jakob Seel, an ethnic Volga German living in the Soviet Union in 1938, is dismissed from his teaching job for being considered politically unreliable. He then is arrested and sent to prison for conducting a prayer at a funeral, but eventually finds purpose in prison by organizing a prison choir. One day, the man who denounced him is also arrested and sent to Jakob’s prison. Can Jakob forgive him? The title, Under Jakob’s Ladder, seems to be a Biblical allusion, while the name Seel is very close to the German word Seele, which means “soul.” This movie was produced by Roberto Muñoz’s CubeCity Entertainment of New York City, a tiny non-profit organization.

Red Dawn (2012): Remake of the original 1984 movie. Only now, instead of Soviet paratroopers descending onto a Colorado town, this time it’s North Koreans. (!) Chris Hemsworth, later of the Thor franchise, stars.

The Americans (2013-2018): A multi-year series made for the FX television network, and a compelling one. It features the exploits of two married KGB undercover “illegal” agents, Philip Jennings and Elizabeth Jennings, who are living and working near Washington D.C. during the years of the Reagan administration. They are “illegal” because they have no diplomatic status and can be arrested and imprisoned for crimes like anybody else. And crimes they do commit. Not only do they commit espionage, Philip and Elizabeth are actually Soviet citizens posing as middle-class Americans -- with two children of their own! -- who work under the control of the KGB’s Moscow “Center” and not the Soviet Embassy. While they are otherwise normal people with consciences and even virtues, for whatever missions the Center assigns them they do not hesitate to commit any act needed to accomplish it, including murder, theft, blackmail, seduction, betrayal. In the beginning of the series, in 1981, everything is going well in the Jennings household, until one day when a new neighbor moves in next door -- who turns out to be an FBI Special Agent working in the Counterespionage Division... Starring Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Noah Emmerich, Richard Thomas.

The Interview (2014): Seth Rogen dark comedy about two tabloid journalists (played by Rogen and James Franco) who land an interview in North Korea with Kim Jong-Un, and who are then suborned by the CIA into a plot to assassinate him. Anti-Communist, because it pulls no punches in depicting the Orwellian nightmare that is North Korea.

Child 44 (2015): “Inspired” (if that’s the word) by the story of Andrei Chikatilo, the Red Ripper of Rostov, Russia, which is described in the plot summary above of 1992’s Citizen X. This movie was a box-office bomb. In 1952, an MGB officer (predecessor organization of the KGB) discovers the 44^th dismembered child’s body along the rail line from Moscow to Rostov-na-Donu. But since officially, murder has been abolished in the Soviet Union, something else must be responsible. Eventually, the MGB officer locates the murderer, who admits he just can’t stop. The MGB man kills him in a shoot-out but is forced to state in the postmortem report that while the murderer did kill the children, he did it because he had been turned by the Nazis while their POW. He is able to continue investigating murders under this premise. Gary Oldman, who later played Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, was in this one.

Gulag Barashevo (2015): American independent film producer Michael Kingsbury is the owner of the very tiny production company Celtic-Films. Specializing in “Human Rights Films,” he has apparently created a franchise of shooting low-budget Gulag movies with moral and Christian messages. Since he’s an American producer and these movies are anti-Communist, they make this listing. He has produced three to date. In Gulag Barashevo, dissidents, poets, and musicians are incarcerated. The love between a dissident poetess and her husband, separated by the Gulag, enables them to endure agonizing hardship, sickness, violence.

Gulag Vorkuta (2016): The second of Michael Kingsbury’s Gulag movies. Two dissidents in the Vorkuta archipelago of camps, one of them the survivor of multiple gang rapes in other islands of the Gulag Archipelago system, fall in love and seek to escape but must first answer the deepest moral questions about the meaning of life, sacrifice, and freedom. Vorkuta was one of the worst places in the Gulag system. It was an archipelago of 132 main camps and subcamps devoted to coal mining, located in European Russia 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Hail Caesar! (2016): A Coen Brothers movie. Like most of their work, a black comedy. In 1951, Eddie Mannix is a Hollywood “fixer,” that is, someone who has to solve, or fix problems that arise during the production of movies. Along with the usual problems such as pregnant leading ladies, Mannix one day must deal with the kidnapping of the leading star of the swords-and-sandals production Hail Caesar! A Tale of the Christ. (!) This actor, Baird Whitlock (played by George Clooney), is being held for ransom for $100,000 by “The Future,” a group of Communist screenwriters spouting Marxist claptrap. This movie lampoons the Hollywood Ten, sees its Clooney character being backhanded for parroting Marxist gibberish, and pokes fun at Herbert Marcuse, the intellectual godfather of the 1960s New Left movement. Also stars Ralph Fiennes, Josh Brolin, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, and Frances McDormand (who seems to be the Coens’ “go-to girl,” since she received an Oscar for their movie Fargo.)

Gulag Magadan (2017): The third of Michael Kingsbury’s Gulag movies. Three dissidents, Larisa, Pyotr, and Yelizaveta, discover the real reasons why they were consigned into the Gulag system. They undergo powerful changes in self-hatred, shame, pride. This echoes the “The Ascent” chapter in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, wherein he credits prison for forcing him to confront those faults within himself, and then exclaims, “Bless you, prison, for being in my life!" (And from beyond the grave, a voice intones: ‘That’s all very well for you to say. But then, you survived!’). Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk, Russian Far East, and specializing in gold-and minerals mining, was probably the second-worst place in the Gulag system, with only Kolyma being worse. In May, 1944, U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace was given a show tour of Magadan and Kolyma, and his NKVD hosts duped him into believing and gushing that he had seen “a combination Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hudson’s Bay Company!” For the Democratic Party, this was the final straw. Its leadership knew that Franklin Roosevelt was dying, probably would not survive his fourth term, and that whoever they nominated for vice president probably would become the next President. A creature like Henry Wallace was unacceptable, so they informed FDR that the convention would dump Wallace and turn to Harry Truman instead. “Sorry, Hank,” said FDR, “but my hands are tied.” So let’s hear it for smoke-filled rooms. When Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994, he flew by private jet and made it a point to land first in Magadan, where he kissed the earth in honor of all who had died there.

Ashes in the Snow (2019): A perverse coming-of-age story. At age 16 in 1941, the aspiring Lithuanian artist Lina is looking forward to what life has to offer: first dates, first romance, art school. Then one night, the NKVD deports her and her family to Siberia. While there, she makes drawings of her experiences, hoping that they can make their way to her father, who is in another camp. This one was produced by Sorrento Productions of Santa Monica, California, which is what bestows upon this film its “Hollywood” imprimatur.

The discerning reader may have noticed that with two exceptions, this listing contains no war movies. None from the Korean War, only two from Vietnam. That’s because this reviewer believes that the other war movies, however worthy many of them are, aren’t anti-Communist as such; instead, they are nothing but war movies in which America’s enemies happen to be Communists. Some of them, e.g. M*A*S*H and Platoon, aren’t even pro-American at all! So they didn’t make this cut.

Documentaries don’t make this cut, either. So the Army’s propaganda documentaries of the 1950s don’t make their way here, and neither does Newt Gingrich’s Nine Days that Changed the World, which is about Pope John Paul’s triumphant return to Poland after his coronation as Pope.

Although this reviewer made this listing as comprehensive as possible, it is possible that some titles were missed. The reviewer apologizes for this and invites readers to augment this list.

There are many, many anti-Communist movies that aren’t “Hollywood” -- meaning that they weren’t produced by American studios, have no American actors, and received no Hollywood Oscars. Since the purpose of this article is to refute the belief that “Hollywood never produces anti-Communist movies,” there is no point in discussing movies that never had Hollywood connections. It simply isn’t relevant.

But in fact, there must be hundreds of anti-Communist movies by now that have no Hollywood connections. Most of them are produced in Germany, Poland, and RUSSIA. Some are excellent, and that presumably is because they are based on novels that have already been proven to have good plotlines, because they were good enough to be published in book form. They’re like Dr. Zhivago in that respect. But also, speaking of the Russians, who would know better about Communism than its first victims? There is, for example, in Russia a ten-part miniseries of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. That one must be fascinating, because there is enough room in it for the hilarious Eleanor Roosevelt chapter titled “Buddha’s Smile,” wherein she is given a show tour of a tidied-up prison and is duped into believing that she has toured the very modern model of an enlightened penal institution. And there is also room for the chapter titled “The Trial of Prince Igor,” containing the parody treason trial of a medieval prince using Soviet rules of evidence.

But the fact is, these films, regrettably, have nothing to do with Hollywood, which is the topic of this article. And so this reviewer has, with regret, left them out of this listing.

This reviewer was surprised by a discovery made while doing the research for this article. Particularly in the last twenty years, many of these movies were made by tiny studios on shoestring budgets. One of them, Michael Kingsbury’s Celtic Films, seems to be a one-man operation! Sorrento Productions and Roberto Muñoz’s CubeCity Entertainment are tiny operations. And while the Coen Brothers are certainly bigger than these outfits, nobody would mistake them for MGM, either.

For this reason, this reviewer believes that not only is it not true that “Hollywood” produces no anti-Communist movies, the U.S. film industry is actually entering a Golden Age of anti-Communist film-making. The big studios are free to jump on the bandwagon or stay off, but if they do stay off, then there is no shortage of small outfits able to fill in the gaps. We’ll be seeing more of these movies.

The author is an Iowa truck driver known to some AT readers as Kzintosh.