White Nights

White Nights (1985) is Taylor Hackford's dance-driven thriller, available to watch online on iFILM. Ballet star Nikolai Rodchenko once defected from the USSR to the West. Then his plane makes an emergency landing on Soviet soil, and the dancer is trapped inside the country he fled.

The KGB takes its time. Rodchenko is housed under guard with Raymond Greenwood, a Black American tap dancer who moved to the Soviet Union to protest Vietnam and has regretted it ever since. Two performers who speak through entirely different kinds of movement slowly bond over a single goal — to break free. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines do their own dancing on camera, with Helen Mirren, Isabella Rossellini and Jerzy Skolimowski as the icy security officer circling them.

Hackford fuses spy-thriller tension with real choreography: Baryshnikov's classical line meets Hines' tap head-on, in frame and unfaked. Lionel Richie's "Say You, Say Me," written for the picture, went on to win the Oscar for Best Original Song. Stream White Nights online on iFILM.