Black Lightning

Black Lightning (2009) — watch online on iFILM — Russia's first homegrown superhero blockbuster, produced by Timur Bekmambetov's Bazelevs studio and directed by Dmitri Kiselev and Alexander Voitinsky. Grigory Dobrygin plays Dima Maikov, a Moscow university student whose father gives him an old Soviet Volga GAZ-21. The car flies.

At first Dima treats this as a private joy ride above the city's traffic jams. Then something happens to his family, and hovering above New Year's Moscow stops being a game. Viktor Verzhbitsky plays the millionaire villain with designs on the capital; Sergei Garmash brings grounded warmth as Dima's father; Yekaterina Vilkova is the girl who gives the hero something worth fighting for beyond revenge.

The film runs the Hollywood superhero playbook — origin story, reluctant hero, escalating stakes — but plants it firmly in recognizable Moscow geography: the Garden Ring, the Kremlin towers in winter, holiday crowds lighting up the city centre. Stream Black Lightning (2009) online on iFILM.