Like all of this peculiar director's movies (which include "Quest for Fire" and "Seven Years in Tibet"), "Enemy at the Gates" establishes its own mythic realm, full of grandiose themes and powerful images. For once, Annaud has chosen a story big enough and stark enough to stand up to this treatment, and the result is a tense and artful war film that works both as thrilling spectacle and as intimate drama.

Did the real Zaitsev -- a shepherd boy from the Ural Mountains who became the greatest Soviet hero of World War II, a proletarian Paul Revere -- possess the dreamboat Anglo-Saxon features of Jude Law? Well, no; historical photographs show a grinning, broad-faced Russian with a flattened nose and protuberant ears. But the symbolic narrative Annaud constructs here, as fictional in its way as any Soviet propaganda film, demands a beautiful hero, an untrustworthy sidekick and a dark-hearted but not ignoble villain. So he gives us all these things in turn.

Annaud has never been big on subtlety, and any film that opens with a narrator intoning, "Autumn 1942. Europe lies crushed beneath the Nazi jackboot," while a black swastika ink stain spreads across a cartoon map, is treacherously close to self-parody. Actually, that's not even the beginning. We've already had the opening credits, in that fake-Cyrillic typeface meant to suggest Russian (at least the R's are not backward), followed by a brief, awkward scene of the young Vassili being taught to shoot wolves by his rheumy granddad. (Even in the official Soviet version of the Zaitsev legend, his childhood targets were deer, not wolves.) If it's beginning to feel like a long evening, that's Annaud; he's only made nine movies in 25 years, and in most of them he seems to spend half his time trying to drive viewers away.

As if snapping out of its stupor, "Enemy of the Gates" then flings the grown-up Zaitsev (Law), a raw Red Army recruit, into a horrific opening battle that rivals the D-day invasion in Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" for gore and intensity. Under personal orders from Stalin to stem the German tide at his namesake city, Soviet commanders are desperately, hysterically flinging ill-prepared troops across the Volga into the hopeless battle, terrorizing them en route and shooting them if they try to retreat. Filmed using a combination of digital effects and a replica Stalingrad built in rural Germany, "Enemy at the Gates" is stunning as spectacle and sharply disorienting as narrative. Clearly our only choice is to root for the Russians against the Nazi invaders, but from the outset the Reds seem cruel, cowardly, all but defeated.

Surviving the slaughter through guile and sheer luck, Zaitsev saves the life of a political commissar named Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) and polishes off five Germans, one of them a senior officer taking a shower, with five bullets. Sensing a propaganda opportunity, and a chance for personal advancement, Danilov puts Zaitsev and his exploits on the front page of the army newspaper. The young sharpshooter becomes an example to the troops and a hero to the entire nation. Daily the list of his Nazi kills grows into the dozens. Danilov's boss, no less a personage than Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins at his growliest and best), is well pleased. The big boss in the Kremlin himself, whom we see only in godlike floor-to-ceiling paintings, is said to have his eyes on our shepherd-sniper.

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