Gorky Park

Gorky Park (1983) is a Cold War crime thriller you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Michael Apted and adapted from Martin Cruz Smith's bestselling novel. William Hurt plays Moscow police inspector Arkady Renko, who catches a case no one wants solved: three corpses in Gorky Park, fingertips removed, faces destroyed beyond recognition.

Every step Renko takes into the investigation is met with a door shutting in his face. His superiors want the file buried. Working alone, he traces the bodies to an American fur trader — played by Lee Marvin in full menace — and finds himself navigating a conspiracy that connects Soviet officialdom to Western money. Brian Dennehy shows up as an FBI man whose agenda is equally opaque.

Hurt makes Renko a man who keeps pushing not out of idealism but out of sheer stubbornness — it's a quieter, more interior performance than the film's thriller packaging suggests. The Moscow sequences were shot in Helsinki, which gives the whole film a peculiar, authentic chill. Stream Gorky Park (1983) online on iFILM.