Smert Ioanna Groznogo

That title translates as "The Death of Ivan The Terrible." The movie starts with his election by the boyars, and ends with him dying with a comet in the sky. Although the writing is credited to Tolstoy from his plays, the short length of the film and the primitive state of Russian film-making -- still heavily influenced by the French -- makes it one of those films where you have to know the story to understand what is going on.

Nonetheless, given the warnings above, it's quite good for the time. People imagine that Russian film-making began in the 1920s with the Academicians, but it was quite a lively industry before the war, and this movie's director, Vasili Goncharov and Yakov Protazanov , were important film makers in this period, whose work evolved rapidly. Goncharov died in 1915, but Protazanov continued to direct until shortly before his death in 1945 at the age of 64.