To Kill a Dragon (1988)

Lancelot, a knight-errant, comes upon a town where a three-headed dragon has ruled for four hundred years, taking a girl each year as tribute. This year it is the turn of Elsa, the archivist's daughter, and Lancelot challenges the dragon to battle. But the people of the town have grown used to their tyrant, who can take a human form, and are frightened of what freedom might bring. Based on Yevgeny Schwartz's 1943 play The Dragon, a satire on dictatorship once banned in the Soviet Union, Mark Zakharov's film arrived in the last years of the USSR and was read as a bitter allegory about tyranny and the people who submit to it. Oleg Yankovsky's charming, menacing Dragon is its standout performance.