MOVIES - May 4, 1987

The Soviet Union will enter five films at the Cannes International Film Festival this month, including the movie “Repentance”--a film so blunt in depicting the horror of the Stalin era it was banned for two years immediately after its completion. In another sign of a cultural thaw under Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reform policies, the Soviet Union will enter a documentary film, “Is It Easy to Be Young?”--a hard-biting look by Latvian director Juri Podnieks at disaffected Soviet youth. The other entries: an anti-nuclear war movie, “Letters From a Dead Man”; the screen adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1884 short story “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” and a biting satirical film set in post-1917 Georgia, “My English Granddaddy.”