When you travel to Russia on your adoption journeys, chances are good you'll be seeing a lot of in-flight movies. Particularly if you travel to the Russian Far East, as I did twice in 2005.

Now I realize that in-flight entertainment is rarely the best indication of a movie maker's cinematic prowess. Forgoing the standard G, PG-13, etc. ratings system, a dear friend of mine rates movies this way: Big Screen, Small Screen, Airplane and Airplane No Sound. And most of the movies I saw on my trips to Sakhalin definitely fell into the latter category. So it was that I read with interest a recent piece on the "Russia Profile" Web site about the state of Russian cinema.

It's not good, says the writer, Mumin Shakirov, who penned his commentary in the wake of the Kinotavr film festival in Sochi, Russia's largest showing of independently made movies. What's wrong? Well, while many people in America take issue with Hollywood, Shakirov says one of Russia's chief problems is that it lacks major studios such as The Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures or Universal Studios. Instead, Russian film makers rely heavily on government subsidies, much as they did during Soviet times. Because Russian film makers aren't putting their own capital at risk, Shakirov says, they rarely make movies that are box office successes, at home or abroad. Have any of you seen Dnevnoy Dozor (Day Watch), Svolochi (Scum), Piter FM, and Bumer 2 (Boomer 2)? I haven't, but I know that American movies like Shrek 3 are killing at the Russian box office right now.

Of the 80 to 90 movies made for theatrical or TV release in Russia every year, only five or six are profitable. To have a real movie industry, Shakirov asserts, you have to be willing to risk it all at the box office.

Now I know that, as a good capitalist, I should be applauding that kind of thinking. But still, I am puzzled. As recently as two years ago, BusinessWeek's Moscow correspondent was celebrating the resurgence of the Russian movie industry, saying that rising living standards were creating a demand for movies as vibrant as anything in the Mosfilm era (Mosfilm was the Soviet movie monolith). Shakirov doesn't explore movie economics, but he does fret that censorship--self-censorship by Putin-wary business backers--is playing a role.

Want to know more about Russian movies? Both IMDB.com, the Internet movie database, and Wikipedia maintain lists of Russian films. List of Russian-language films. Mosfilm still operates, and its English-language Web site is here. And if you are in or near New York City, Columbia University's Russia International Association regularly screens Russian films during the school year.