The success of HBO’s Chernobyl and Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit a few years ago reignited mainstream interest in Cold War-era politics. This interest was no doubt fueled further by Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, which revisited the tense years spent creating the world’s first atomic weapons, and ended up grossing nearly $1 billion worldwide. The Cold War was over, but Russia was once again emerging as a popular antagonist on the geopolitical stage. This streak continued last week with Star City, an austere spin-off to Apple TV’s For All Mankind, which takes place in an alternate history where the Space Race never ended. Star City presents the Soviet perspective of the contest, brimming with political intrigue and intense paranoia.
The Space Race remains perhaps the most well-known soft power showdown between the two warring nations and their allies during the Cold War. It was framed as though the nation that made the greatest advances in aerospace would gain an edge over the other. Other proxy battles were famously held in the arena of video games and sports. The Soviet ice hockey team emerged as the greatest in the world at the time. The Soviets also dominated the world of chess for the entirety of the Cold War, with grandmasters such as Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov picking up from where Mikhail Tal and Boris Spassky left off. However, there was one notable exception in the history of chess where an American emerged as the world champion — the sole non-Soviet player to hold the world title in around five decades.
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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
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🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
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01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
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02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
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03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
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04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
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05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
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06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
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07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
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08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
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09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
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10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
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The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
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Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
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Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
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Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
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No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
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Here’s Where You Can Watch the Cold War-Era Sports Thriller for Free
He claimed the title in a legendary Cold War-era face-off against Spassky. This face-off was dramatized in a movie directed by Edward Zwickand released in 2014. The movie in question, Pawn Sacrifice, stars Tobey Maguireas the legendary Bobby Fischer and Liev Schreiber as Spassky. Both Fischer and Spassky were being used as pawns for their governments, which put immense pressure on them to secure prestige for their countries. Pawn Sacrifice underperformed commercially, grossing just $5 million worldwide. It now holds a “Certified Fresh” 73% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “Anchored by a sensitive performance from Tobey Maguire, Pawn Sacrifice adds another solidly gripping drama to the list of films inspired by chess wiz Bobby Fischer.” The movie is currently streaming for free in the U.S. on Tubi. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
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