canadude

Ostensibly a Holocaust drama, this is a film about the lies we tell ourselves daily to live amid the horrors, injustices, or inequalities we are surrounded by and complicit in. Consequently, this is the first film explicitly about *how* the Holocaust happened / was allowed to happen (cf., Schindler's List is about *what* happened, a descriptive movie; The Pianist about the will to survive and live as a stance against the nihilistic core of the Holocaust). But as Glazer himself has said, this is not a film about "what they did" but about "what we do." It's so unnerving because it confronts us with what it takes for us to go about our daily lives while ignoring injustices we may encounter daily, for instance naturalizing the status of a homeless person we pass daily (for whom we could do something) to ignoring the brutal routinized slaughter our country is committing against a people who live next door (and which we may even justify to ourselves and others). This is a film about complicity and the *human* work of distancing and naturalizing (and it is work because it requires constant renewal), all in the service of our ongoing existence. This is where its horror lies, and its ability to communicate it so effectively makes it one of the greatest of films of this new century.

There are exceptions in "The Zone" - characters who refuse this complicity and who act against it, either by leaving or by actively trying to help the victims. But there is no guarantee that any of us would be one of them.

Gossip Girl meets the Columbine massacre in this problematically exploitative garbage that turns a school shooting into a melodramatic soap about a series of uber-wealthy and just regular wealthy Swedish students with some drugs and parental neglect tossed in. A ridiculous, convoluted love triangle, some fuzzily sketched and never-resolved anti-immigrant politics, and fairly rudimentary teen "coming of age" partying unevenly mixed into a six-episode salad that revolves, interminably, around the question of the main character's complicity in a school shooting. Where The Sinner achieves emotional, moral, and psychological complexity, this piles on cliche after cliche, and amounts to nothing.

Putin is a tyrant, but this portrait of his key opponent doesn't focus on Navalny's politics, strategy, or work on mobilizing Russian opposition against Putin. Instead, while well-made, it's a pretty underwhelming investigation into the attempted poisoning of Navalny revealing the comical ineptitude of Russian secret services in carrying out the assassination attempt (contrasted with their brutal effectiveness at beating and arresting protesters).

The film's biggest problem is that its portrait of Navalny - aside from telling us he endured an assassination attempt - is that he's an effective influencer. The film's as shallow as the platitudes Navalny spits out in a key scene in which a director asks him to send a message to his Russian supporters. Navalny pulls cliches like "evil triumphs when good people do nothing," and "never give up." These pithy one liners resonate on TikTok, which we're repeatedly shown the politician has effectively mastered through tight, obsessive editorial control. But the filmmakers are less adept at capturing his vision for a post-Putin Russia, aside from vague promises of "getting rid of corruption" and working with all Russians (which apparently include Nazi supporters). The film shows little interest in these more complex issues, which aren't as immediately exciting as identifying Navalny's inept assassins and which can't be summed up in a glib social media soundbite.