When Vladimir Putin daydreams about the glories of the old Soviet Union, he’s probably not thinking about Tetris, still among the most popular videogames ever created and the U.S.S.R.’s most important contribution to international pop culture since Boris Pasternak . Mr. Putin might long to retrieve the rights to the game, though, which is what “Tetris” is all about. There have been a number of very good films in recent years that might be described as business-political thrillers, among them “American Hustle,” “The Wolf of Wall Street” and even “Joy,” in which the villainy was mostly about greed, forged signatures, illicit payoffs and general scammery—rather than, say, spies, surveillance, threats of death and car chases. “Tetris,” in its generosity and occasional overkill, provides all of the above, along with Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers , a game designer and hustler described by one Soviet citizen as “dumb, but honest.” He’s not really dumb, though. He’s just naïve and guileless enough to think he can go to a country where the “game over” sign is already starting to blink and where diehard Marxists and would-be capitalists are picking over the bones of a decaying empire.

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