Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot

Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot (1958) is available to watch online on iFILM. The middle chapter of an unfinished trilogy finds Nikolai Cherkasov back as the tsar — no longer the empire-builder of Part I, but a ruler being eaten from inside by the power he seized.

The boyars are scheming against him, and the plot is led by his own aunt, Euphrosyne Staritskaya, who dreams of crowning her dim son Vladimir. Serafima Birman gives her a cold, almost reptilian precision. Eisenstein stages all of it like a grim ritual theater: shadows crawling over stone vaults, faces frozen in close-up like masks, the camera tilting until every angle reads as judgment. Then the oprichniks' dance abruptly bursts into color — two-strip Agfacolor, an oddity on the Soviet screen of the mid-1940s.

Stalin ordered the trilogy personally, then watched Part II and had it shelved: the tyrant on screen looked too much like the man who paid for it. Eisenstein died in early 1948 before shooting the third part, and the finished film waited a full decade to reach audiences. A heavy, ceremonial piece for lovers of avant-garde classics. Stream Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1958) online on iFILM.