MOSCOW – Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia's most famous and well-connected film director, has drawn unexpected critical fire for his epic new war movie, Burnt by the Sun 2. The Exodus, which, more predictably, is an official entry at the Cannes International Film Festival this week.

As Russia prepared its elaborate marking of the 65th anniversary of its victory over Nazi Germany, Mr. Mikhalkov's film enjoyed a premiere in the Kremlin Palace concert hall, which seats 6,000 people and is just a few steps from the presidential office.

At $55 million, the budget was the largest of any post-Soviet Russian movie. And, in testimony to the director's connections to Vladimir V. Putin, the prime minister who Mr. Mikhalkov claims as a personal friend, the film used materials from American and British military archives and documents that were until recently classified in the archives of the FSB, the successor agency of the KGB.

Both Mr. Putin and President Dmitry A. Medvedev visited the film set, and Russia's Ministry of Defense helped in the filming of battle scenes.

At the premiere, Mr. Mikhalkov tied the film to the celebrations of Victory Day, which were especially elaborate this year, in part because it is one of the last opportunities to mark the event with living veterans.

"We were convinced," the director said from the Kremlin Palace stage, "that in order to understand the cost of this victory, we must see what our people went through."

In a sense, this is a courageous move, since the scale of millions of Soviet deaths – dwelt on in great and gory detail in the three-hour movie – and whether Stalin could have avoided such mass slaughter, are topics carefully discussed in Russia.

But for all the lavish attention – the movie opened in just more than 1,000 theaters after its April 22 premiere – it is no blockbuster. It took in just over $3.7 million and was top movie its first weekend. But by the May 1 holiday weekend, when many Russians who didn't head to their dachas headed to the movies, Burnt by the Sun 2 earnings had fallen nearly threefold, and Iron Man 2 with Robert Downey Jr. was the top movie in Russia, taking in $7.7 million.

Special showings were arranged for veterans as part of the release. A school director in Vladivostok complained to the RIA Novosti news agency that bureaucrats were ordering that schoolchildren be shown the film, but officials said it was the initiative of the schools, and Moscow officials refuted a blogger's claims that schoolchildren in the Russian capital were being forced to watch the film.

Burnt by the Sun 2 is officially a sequel to Burnt by the Sun, Mr. Mikhalkov's elegiac, Oscar-winning 1994 movie, which depicts an elite family's seemingly idyllic life in the 1930s, doomed by conflicting political and personal loyalties as Stalin's terror takes hold.

In a sense, the first film might have been based on Mr. Mikhalkov's own family, which had its roots in the pre-Revolutionary gentry but served the Soviet regime and thus survived unscathed. The director's father, Sergei Mikhalkov, who died last year, was a children's writer and author of all three versions of the Soviet and then Russian anthem, including one in praise of Stalin.

Mr. Mikhalkov directed and stars in both films, and is preparing a third part called Citadel for release, which will also focus on World War II. He plays Kotov, a Red Army hero who ends up in the GULAG after being betrayed by Mitya, a family friend who turns out to be an agent of the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. Employing a good Hollywood tradition, the film's stars, who appeared doomed to die in the first film, are alive in the second film, which takes place at the beginning of World War II.

The director's daughter Nadezhda plays his daughter in both films, and refuses to renounce her father to the Soviet regime even as she becomes a Soviet Youth Pioneer and fights the Nazis. Kotov, whom she thought dead in the GULAG, flees as his prison camp is being bombed, and races to the front.

While the original Burnt by the Sun was in many ways like a Chekhov story set in the Stalin era, Burnt by the Sun 2 is bloody – some scenes have been compared to Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan – phantasmagoric, and accentuating Russian Orthodox mysticism and miracles in the war effort.

Critics are finding Mr. Mikhalkov's latest round of ubiquity particularly grating, and many gleefully attacked this latest film, irritated both by him and his interpretation of history. Several dozen filmmakers and critics have also signed a petition protesting Mr. Mikhalkov's domination of Russia's film industry.

World War II and the Stalin era have been the subject of impassioned debate in Russia in the past year, and government officials have been both accused of fostering creeping Stalinism and praised for taking positive measures to come to terms with the past.

As President, Mr. Putin promoted a history teaching manual that praised Stalin, but last month was praised for his frank words about Stalin's responsibility for the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers in 1940 and sensitive handling of the crash of the Polish president Lech Kaczynski's plane on the way to a ceremony at the forest site near Smolensk. (Both Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev were careful to avoid saying that Russia was to blame for the massacre.)

Plans by Moscow's mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov to hang portraits of Stalin on the streets of Moscow to mark the Victor Day celebration were scrapped on logistical pretexts – and might have been vandalized, as they have been on occasion in other Russian cities. Some portraits of the dictator were hung in museums, where they drew the ire of human-rights activists.

Dmitry Bykov, an author and social commentator, wrote in Novaya gazeta, a newspaper known for its opposition stance, that Burnt by the Sun 2 fully reflects the Putin era.

"The cinematic style of late Mikhalkov is an extremely faithful expression of the Putin era, in which polemics are also senseless," he wrote in the April 21 edition of the newspaper, and offered a series of possible interpretations for qualities they both share:

"Extreme cynicism and the domination of personal proximity to the source of power above all other criteria? The catastrophic decline in the intellectual level of the country in everything, from cinematography to television and ideological doctrine? Everything is for sale and everything is permitted? Manipulating and profiteering from the great past, which you did not forge but which you have privatized?"