Donbass
| Release Date: January 11, 2019 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
78
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 17 Critic Reviews
Positive:
16
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleNov 22, 2020
Filmed by the great Romanian cinematographer and frequent Loznitsa collaborator Oleg Mutu in long, patient takes that intensify each sequence’s brittle contrasts, Donbass coalesces into an unflinching dispatch from a state of embattlement both region-specific and 21st century-pervasive. Read full review
90
VoxAlissa WilkinsonApr 15, 2022
Portraying a lie as the truth so forcefully, so unrelentingly, that people just believe it is a key to understanding Loznitsa’s portrait of the region. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. ScottApr 7, 2022
Donbass, at once brutally satirical and grimly compassionate, focuses on the subtleties and grotesqueries of human behavior. Loznitsa paints sprawling tableaus of cruelty, corruption, vulgarity and lies through a series of intimate vignettes. Read full review
83
Original-CinJim SlotekNov 24, 2020
The Belarus-born Loznitsa, now a Ukrainian citizen, is not a follower of the “brevity is the soul of wit” school of dark humour. Each vignette is almost too long to earn that descriptor, almost as if he doesn’t want to let go of a scene until the viewer is utterly uncomfortable. But that churn builds on itself, taking us by the last act to a dark and cynical place. Read full review
80
BBCCaryn JamesApr 8, 2022
For many of us, especially in the West, the film is likely to be confusing here and there. It would have been helpful, for example, if the subtitles had let us know who's speaking Russian and who's speaking Ukrainian. But it is worth a bit of confusion for a film so powerful and immediate, and made with such a lucid artistic vision. Read full review
80
VarietyJay WeissbergMay 18, 2018
Corruption and humiliation are the guiding forces of Donbass, resulting in a scathing portrait of a society where human interaction has descended to a level of barbarity more in keeping with late antiquity than the so-called contemporary civilized world. Read full review
80
CineVueMartyn ConterioMay 18, 2018
The film’s displays of humour give away to harsher scenes of brutality and intense moments where rural calm is suddenly disrupted by mortar explosions and transformed landscapes dotted with corpses. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 18, 2018
Donbass is a flawed, but vivid achievement. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineCarson LundApr 4, 2022
The film’s collisions between the grave and the comic are crucial to its vision of a society cracking under the weight of its own inconsistencies. Read full review
75
The PlaylistChris BarsantiMar 31, 2022
While Donbass is far from perfect, hiding too much of its story and message in at-times dull and layered absurdity, it nevertheless presents a harrowing picture of how war and nationalism corrupt and degrade places nowhere near the battlefield. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreMar 29, 2022
It takes a while to settle into Loznitsa’s storytelling style and get a handle on the points he’s making. Non-natives aren’t going to pick up on every allusion, the nuances of accent or even the differences between the Russian and Ukrainian being spoken (with subtitles). Read full review
75
The Film StageGiovanni Marchini CamiaMay 19, 2018
In strict terms of craft, Donbass is an impressive achievement, but its heavy-handedness nevertheless feels inordinate. Read full review
73
TheWrapBen CrollMay 18, 2018
No one is spared in Donbass, director Sergei Loznitsa’s scathing look at the (still ongoing) war in eastern Ukraine. Read full review
70
TheWrapLena WilsonApr 8, 2022
It feels as though [Loznitsa] has wrangled an entire uprising’s personality into bite-sized pieces. Read full review
70
Screen DailyJonathan RomneyMay 18, 2018
Like the bullets and bomb blasts that punctuate the narrative, Donbass only sometimes hits its target, but even so, it’s clearly the work of a director with an angry message to get across, in an idiosyncratically caustic way. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinMay 18, 2018
Ultimately, Loznitsa builds up a portrait of a bitter clockwork world where the faces of the doomed are above all part of a landscape. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comSimon AbramsApr 8, 2022
Pathological behavior seems to be the main subject of the bitter Ukrainian satire Donbass, an unpleasant, but as-advertised slice of life drama set in the title region, an embattled territory in Eastern Ukraine. Read full review
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