Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File.

"'Who did it?' asked the filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov when his friend the exiled Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko died of polonium poisoning in a London hospital in November 2006," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "That question resonates throughout Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File, Mr Nekrasov's extraordinary testament to a man whose incendiary allegations against his government might have had fatal consequences."

"Screened at Cannes as Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case, the film is muddled where it should be straightforward, and Nekrasov-centered when the focus should be on Litvinenko," writes Martha Mercer in the New York Sun.

"Poisoned By Polonium tries to encompass a thousand tiny details of Russia's decline into mob rule," agrees the AV Club's Noel Murray. "Nekrasov comes off like a scatterbrained foreign correspondent, reading off his notes to the bureau chief. The result is a film that does an injustice to the whole chaotic situation in Eastern Europe by making it seem not just impossible, but impenetrable."

Posted by dwhudson at March 24, 2008 12:50 PM