Recensioni di Metacritic

The geopolitical landscape has changed dramatically in the last few months since this sleek, smartly assembled and almost indecently entertaining movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (where it won two audience awards), and as a result, it can feel timely and outdated, relevant and redundant, disturbing and escapist all at once.

The geopolitical stakes are immense and Navalny is essential viewing, especially for any Western audience that may have not been following this story so closely.

Navalny is a barely believable brew of activism, resistance, poisonings, death squads, exiles and homecomings. Most of all, it’s a story of courage in the face of ruthless repression and one of those all-too-rare geopolitical stories where the bad guys actually get some comeuppance.

If you’re coming in with a blank slate, then Navalny is a feast of evermore unbelievable details and a window into a movement against a state of increasingly boldfaced, demeaning lies.

This gripping, muscular piece is markedly immediate - like its subject, who lives for the moment, in the constant shadow of his own death.

At a certain point, Navalny kicks into spy movie mode, detailing how that "Bulgarian nerd" utilizes data acquired from the dark web to pore over phone records and flight manifests to narrow down a possible list of suspects. It's riveting stuff.

The film flashes back to the poisoning, and it could be the most sickening and calamitous suspense-thriller episode you ever saw.

Roher is profoundly lucky to have been around when Navalny’s harrowing story needed to be told, and so are we.

Whatever their respective agendas, Navalny finds subject and filmmaker alike bound together by the shared belief that authoritarian governments are as scared of their people as their people are of them, and the documentary is galvanized by the spectacle of Putin shitting his pants.

This is an incredibly charismatic man with a finely honed sense of his public image, but Roher is also able to capture how prickly he is.