Elena Reviews

... a broad critique of Putin's Russia and corrupting effects of both poverty and wealth on ordinary human values.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10

In different hands, "Elena" might have been a noir thriller, but this serving of cinematic borscht is as cold as a Russian winter.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Be sure to see "Elena" with a friend, because it's the sort of movie where the real experience begins after it ends.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

"Elena" is a riveting psychological suspense film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

A quiet, subtle mystery whose long, penetrating takes have drawn comparisons to Andrei Tarkovsky and whose mordantly ironic conclusion may remind you of Claude Chabrol.

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Zvyaginstsev makes the most of the ghastly settings, which include a backyard that ominously features nuclear cones - and the kinds of compartmentalized living spaces that Hitchcock used for droll effect in "Rear Window."

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

It's a sort of slow-boil Russian noir, if that genre exists, and if it doesn't, it does now.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

The script, by Oleg Negin and Zvyagintsev, uses spare dialogue to quietly devastating effect. Performances are superb across the board, framed in elegant widescreen compositions that simmer with violence.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Andrei Zvyagintsev's film isn't stupid or crude, and we can pretty well imagine how all the characters feel, even though it doesn't make them sympathetic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Elena takes us into the mind of a woman who has been pushed by life into an uncomfortable corner where she has to choose between different kinds of love...[a]very solid, intense drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

A nicely noirish, cynically satisfying drama set in a gritty, urban Moscow that would otherwise not seem to be a haven for wildlife.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

A thoroughly modern twist on the classic noir, framed for our modern times in contemporary Moscow, where the gap between the haves and the have nots is stark.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

Elena is an acquired taste, a film that doesn't provide cheap thrills or easy, pat resolutions, nor any moral certainty

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Here's a tip: Don't feel. Think. Zvyagintsev wants you to come out of "Elena" thinking something, and if your realization is an uneasy one, that's OK with him.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Acid portrait of an unhappy marriage in contemporary Moscow.

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A grim, effective allegory of the daily whirl in Putinland.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

"Elena" reveals a filmmaker in full command of his art and not much interested in catering to an audience. If you want this film, you have to meet it more than halfway.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Director Zvyagintsey displays a deft hand with his small troupe of performers and has a talent for making family dramas with an edge.

Full Review | Original Score: B

...has more in common with Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman" [than "The Return"] imbued with a Russian male perspective on today's dog eat dog world, a breakdown of societal morality.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

Naturalism lives. If Zola were a Russian in Russia today, he might have written Elena.

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