This article is devoted to the reflections of Soviet cinematographers on the social, political and ideological changes of 1985-1991 that took place in the USSR as part of the course of Perestroika. Using films as a historical source, the author defines a list of social problems addressed by the directors of the second half of the 1980s, attempts to reconstruct the creators' concerns about the fate of their country during that period and analyzes their forecasts in those socio-economic and political conditions. Through hermeneutic analysis of the films of Eldar Aleksandrovich Ryazanov, Sergei Alexandrovich Solovyov and Karen Georgievich Shakhnazarov the author comes to a number of conclusions, the central of which is closely related to the prognostic function of art. Those directors are considered not only as direct witnesses of the events that took place, but also as active researchers of their time, exploring modernity from an artistic point of view. The study also reveals the specific artistic features of the representation of the listed problems in the movies by different directors and highlights common and overlapping motives.