Berlin  - Twenty years after popular uprisings swept away decades of Communist rule across Eastern Europe, Hollywood and studio bosses in the West are still trying to come to terms with the changes unleashed by the implosion of the Evil Empire.

"Christ, I miss the Cold War," admitted British actress Judi Dench playing the secret service chief M in James Bond's Casino Royale.

Indeed, the Cold War villains, who had been such a source of tension for post-Second World War films seemed to disappear almost overnight with the end of communism leaving the motion picture industry searching for new story lines about the perils threatening the Western world.

The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington have clearly opened up new avenues of inspiration for Hollywood directors.

Certainly, James Bond appears to have successfully managed to make the leap from outsmarting psychopathic Soviet agents as encapsulated in the 1960's From Russia With Love to the modern terrorists of 007's more recent films.

But for other movie makers, the journey from red scare to terrorist menace seems to have been more treacherous.

To be sure, the stream of films produced about the horrors of the terrorist raids on the US and the threat posed by radical Islamists somehow don't seem to have managed to measure up to films representing the height of 1950's Cold War movie making.

This included Christian Nyby's science fiction The Thing from Another World about a human-eating alien stalking Americans at remote Arctic outpost and Don Siegel's The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a horror film about emotionless aliens replicating the residents of a small US town.

In a sense, Hollywood's - at times paranoid - Cold-War agenda appeared to reflect its own experiences as a target of the notorious US Congress' Un-American Activities Committee during the 1940s and 1950s.

Of course, back then the Reds proved to be no match for Hollywood's heroes as they battled to save the world from the spread of communism and undertook acts of extraordinary bravery to stop secret documents falling into the hands of Moscow's henchmen.

However, the storylines of the post-Cold War film world have been more complicated and as a consequence seem to have been a harder sell to cinemagoers.

US director Stephen Gaghan's 2005 political thriller Syriana about the oil business' growing global influence won critical acclaim.

But this sometimes confrontational movie set against the backdrop of the traumas of the war in Iraq seemed to fail to fire up moviegoers' imaginations.

The same is true of movies such as Rendition about the apprehension and illegal transfer of suspected terrorists from one state to another.

Many US directors have looked elsewhere, discovering a new rich source of bad guys in a war closer to home and generated by the brutal violence of drug and urban gangs.

Enjoying something of a renaissance in recent years has been Eastern Europe's more economical film industry. After being essentially wiped out by the collapse of communism and state support, the region's movie business has been carving out a new role for itself.

Once charged with pumping out communist-era propaganda movies, film studios across Eastern Europe have been transformed into modern movie-making facilities as nations such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania have found themselves on the global movie business map as low-cost film production locations.

This in turn has helped to lay the ground for the emergence of a new generation of directors.

But while Hollywood has struggled to grasp the new post-communist world, young Eastern European directors have set about taking a new look at life under the Moscow-backed dictatorships, which helped to shape the early part of their lives.

"In 1989 we were reborn," said Hungarian producer Nemenyi Adam.

Instead of Hollywood's attempts to recreate what it thought was life behind the Iron Curtain, the new breed of Eastern European directors actually witnessed first hand the often fraught world of communism.

In particular, this includes Cristian Mungiu's 4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) about a young woman's attempt to arrange an illegal abortion in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania. It won the Cannes Film Festival's prestigious Palme d'Or in 2007.

The breaching of the Berlin Wall has been equally inspiring for directors on both sides of what was once Germany's post-Second World War divide.

Two years ago, Cologne-based Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck won an Oscar for his portrayal of the banality of evil as typified by East Germany's feared secret police in Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). (dpa)