Good is very subjective, so I want to be clear that my recommendations are fairly particular in taste. This is not about accuracy, nor is this even about critical acclaim. To be sure, Soviet era cinema has a ton of incredibly well done films set during the Great Patriotic War which are worth looking into if you want something like that. I'd toss out Ballad of a Soldier and The Cranes are Flying are two obvious examples. Both are considered masterpieces, and the latter won top honors at Cannes when it came out.

I'll level with you though, they are OK as far as I'm concerned. They are the kind of film you really need to be in the right mindset for. What do I enjoy for Russian language war films? Well, for the past decade or so the Russian film industry has been making a veritable treasure trove of war flicks set which are quite a joy to watch, but not in a the "Wow, Best Foreign Language Oscar for sure!" kind of way, but in the 'so bad its good!' kind of way. This new brand of Russian war film really has nothing owed to classic Soviet cinema, or even all that much in comparison to the immediate post-collapse stuff, for anyone familiar with the excellent 1996 Prisoner of the Mountains.

No, these films are patently ridiculous, and all share a fairly similar vein to them stylistically. The plots are almost always told as frame stories from some grizzled old survivor. The culture of the USSR in the period is presented as nothing like the Soviet reality, usually portraying a fairly comfortable middle-class existence, and most noticeably one in which Orthodox faith is practiced openly and accepted. They almost all carry a deep-seated message of Russian chauvinism which gets more than a few eye-rolls per film. But damn it, they are fun to watch in their ridiculousness.

So what would I recommend?

The ultimate film of this genre is 2013's Stalingrad, directed by Fedor Bondarchuk who happens to be the son of the famous Soviet era director Sergei Bondarchuk (want to spend almost as much time watching War and Peace as it takes to read it? Try his four-part epic from the 1960s!), which is incredible in its over-the-top-ness, including one scene of Soviet soldiers who catch on fire but doesn't let it stop them as they charge German positions literally aflame. And of course the frame story needs a specific shout-out due to the basic structure of it being a story told two children trapped in a collapsed building by a rescuer. Did I mention that he is Russian, they are German, and he decided a story of his comrades killing their grandparents was the best way to keep them calm?

Anyways, while that is a good starting point and genre introduction, if you want to make your way through a selection of incredible cinema, one of the most recent additions to the pantheon is T-34, which tells the story of concentration camp prisoners who steal a T-34 and escape, while taking out a half dozen German tanks in the process. The plot is actually considerably more ridiculous than even that makes it sound, but it is great.

Another recent release is Saving Leningrad, which tells the story of an evacuation barge crossing Lake Ladoga from Leningrad which comes under attack by both the Germans, and the weather. The most ludicrous elements might spoil the plot for you, but suffice to say it delivers on the ridiculousness, although it isn't quite the masterpiece of the other two I have mentioned.

An interesting piece of this genre to note is 2015's Battle for Sevastopol, which is a biopic of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the famed female sniper. It doesn't engage in quite the drum-beat of Russian nationalism thanks to in fact being a joint Russo-Ukrainian production, but it doesn't hold back otherwise in its appeal to the tropes you would expect and general divorcement from reality.

The last film I'm mention is the film Fortress of War, although you'll also see it titled The Brest Fortress. From 2010, it tells the story of the opening days of Barbarossa and the heroic stand of the men stationed in Brest near the border. Although not the first film of this genre, as I've constructed it, it definitely was an early one and its impact on the other films I've mentioned is unmistakable, although the general trend, I feel, has been to get more and more over the top, so this seems downright subdued compared to T-34 for instance.

So anyways, I'd again note that good is in the eye of the beholder, and these aren't good films by many metrics. But they are all damn fun to watch, and give you something of a Russian equivalent to the kind of fare you see regularly from the US which is by no means always accurate and often favors entertainment over faithfulness to history.

I am not a historian, but it is my understanding that there are very few English language films on the subject, there are a multitude of reasons of this but one big one is cold war animosity.

Off the top of my head I can only think of two American films positively portraying the Soviets in WW2, and both of these films have problems for different reasons.

"Enemy at The Gates" is a film staring Jude Law about Stalingrad, it caused quite a commotion when it was released and many Russian's despise it because they believe it portrays them as inept and oftentimes evil, along with being extremely inaccurate. But it's an example of an English language film where the Soviets are the protagonists.

"Mission to Moscow" is a very interesting English language film about the Russians (the film treats all Soviets as Russian) in WW2. It's a pretty fascinating film because it is a US made pro Russian propaganda piece to drum up support in WW2, because of that there's only really one year where that film would've been politically possible to make. That film is loaded with massive amounts of inaccurate information and outrageous lies, but it's still a very interesting movie to watch, simply because of the circumstances of it's creation. The man who spearheaded it's creation was a real US diplomat, often considered a "useful idiot". Give it a watch.

There must be other films, but any in the English language will be hard to find