This tragicomic pageant by Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy, Maidan, In the Fog) brings a roiling energy and a lunatic sense of desperation to its larger-than-life vision of today’s Russia.

Inspired by a Dostoevsky short story, A Gentle Creature follows an unnamed woman (Vasilina Makovtseva) moving through a prison town underworld after attempting to visit her incarcerated husband. Loznitsa uses the town as a microcosm for a country where corruption and authority are so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. A Gentle Creature brings its own genius to a Russian tradition of social panoramas, and as the film takes a turn into the carnivalesque and the infernal, it gets at the deeply troubled slumber of a beleaguered country.

“Loznitsa’s (My Joy, In the Fog) . . . [film] is about as strange, perplexing and foreign an experience as any I’ve had at the Festival de Cannes, and the reasons that will limit its commercial viability are the very reasons that you should seek it out.”—Justin Chang, LA Times. 

"Loznitsa’s film first screened in Cannes last May, and since then, with Russia creeping up the news agenda, it has only ripened like a great, stinking, cave-aged cheese. It is the living definition of Not For Everyone, and not a film I will soon forget." ***** Telegraph