White Nights is a once-in-a-lifetime film. It weaves passionate drama, nail-biting suspense, exhilarating dance, and a keen political awareness into a truly fine cinematic tapestry.

Director Taylor Hackford brings together two of the greatest dancers of the twentieth century, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines, in a strong international thriller scripted to cunning perfection by James Goldman and Eric Hughes.

Baryshnikov plays ballet dancer and Soviet defector Nikolai Rodchenko (Baryshnikov was, himself, a Russian defector). Nikolai’s plane is forced to make an emergency landing at a Soviet military base, thus returning him to his native homeland, a country that years ago tried and convicted him — in abstentia — of crimes against the state. While Moscow releases nearly all of the surviving passengers to much international acclaim, Russian officials insist that Nikolai was critically injured and must not be removed from Soviet care....