| Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: December 25, 2014 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
34
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jan 29, 2015
Magnificently acted, expertly crafted and unerringly sure of every treacherous step it takes, Leviathan is an indictment, but also an elegy, a film set among the monumental ruins of a culture, whether they’re the skeletal remains of boats, a whale’s bleached bones, a demolished building or a trail of lives that are either ruined or hopelessly resigned.
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The PlaylistMay 24, 2014
If there was ever any doubt as to Zvyagintsev's position as one of world cinema's foremost auteurs, it's put to rest here. His filmmaking has always been superb, but he's never taken on the state of his nation in the way he does here. And that makes "Leviathan" not just masterful but also hugely important.
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Feb 5, 2015
A sense of dread hovers over all these characters, and, by extension, the audience. It's in the air of the place, like oxygen. And vodka. Lots of vodka. Yet Zvyagintsev's achievement, or one of them, is creating a film that is not one long downer. It's not exactly a laugh riot, but we do care about these people.
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Feb 25, 2015
Vladimir Putin’s Russia – brutal, carnivorous, delusional, but monstrously well-evolved for crushing both spirits and lives large and small – is taken to task in this excoriating portrait of the state’s omnivorous hunger for control in a far-flung northern fishing community on the Barents Sea.
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Dec 17, 2014
Dec 22, 2014
In his three previous films (The Return, The Banishment, Elena), Zvyagintsev frequently pushed past sober into dour, leaning too heavily on a characteristically Soviet sense of gloom and doom... Leviathan is another downer, but it’s considerably looser and livelier than its predecessors, verging at times on black comedy.
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Dec 30, 2014
Leviathan is a tale for vertiginous times, with the ruble in free fall. There must be thousands of stories like Kolya’s right now, lives folding and collapsing, upon which Zvyagintsev could cast his unfoolable eye. Despite that, he is not primarily a satirist, or even a social commentator; he is the calm surveyor of a fallen world, and Leviathan, for all its venom, never writhes out of control.
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Movie NationJan 13, 2015
The politics are rarely overt. “Pussy Riot” stories pop up on TV, and the Orthodox Church’s role in the hierarchy (cozying up to power, serving as a calming “opiate” to the masses) is mocked. Zvyagintsev is a bit too willing, in this overlong film, to let the landscape, the remote setting and the insular world of crumbling apartment blocks, sagging houses, collapsing churches grey skies shape the film’s message.
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