The Putin Interviews

The Putin Interviews is a destabilizing documentary that challenges Americans’ narratives about ourselves and asks the viewer to engage in a conversation with a slippery subject. It’s riveting in how dangerous and intimate it feels, leveraging its multiple camera-angles and hand-held shots to make the viewer feel as if they, too, are in the room with Vladimir Putin.

The conversations are conducted via a Russian translator, and you have to be in the mood to read a lot of subtitles to engage with Putin and Stone’s policy discussions, but that small effort is well worth it. There are light moments here and there.

It's not every interview-driven documentary that's a pleasure to look at, but The Putin Interviews is much more visually dynamic than either of its on-camera subjects. ... Nothing in these first two hours suggests Putin is a man likely to crack or blurt something out off-the-cuff, but it's plausible the pursuit could be entertaining.

In the absence of startling revelations, what’s fascinating about this elaborate production is the theater of it all. Also, the degrees of arrogance on display. And the unspoken motives.

The special is solicitous, even obsequious, but sometimes revealing anyway.

That moment [Comey's Senate hearing] and many others made for far more riveting cinema than the alternately static and stagy visual and narrative design of The Putin Interviews, which consists mostly of talking-head shots of Stone lobbing softballs and Putin dutifully, dispassionately hitting them back.