Dear Comrades! (2019)

This movie was on the short list of international films for the Academy award this year--that is the list of 15 films that the submissions from all countries has been pared down to, and the final five that are nominated come from. The longer list of good foreign language films is a great source for quality films, and sometimes the things that don't make the final cut are less emotionally taut than those that are nominated, so in some ways a bit easier to watch and absorb, at least for me. This movie, which focuses on an outbreak in a town in Soviet Russia in 1962, and everything that is done to cover up the violence and death, to quell the anger, and to let the viewer experience what lie in a totalitarian regime is like. It is magnificent and beautiful. The cinematography is breathtaking and the editing is superb. In reading about the film afterwards, it appears that the director is as complex as this film. There can’t be many people who have made a faithful adaptation of Turgenev’s “A Nest of Gentlefolk” and a buddy-cop thriller with Kurt Russell and Sylvester Stallone—“Tango and Cash” (1989), and now this. His range is as stunning as this film. I promise you it is brutal but not hard to watch and it will make you think about Putin's Russia for quite some time.