I did appreciate A Gentle Creature’s fairytale weirdness and conviction to its oppressive tone, but Loznitsa’s film just doesn’t hold together, and the reliance on crooked fantasy softens its message.

| Dec 5, 2023

Loznitsa's direction is masterful, filling the simplest scenes with details and intrigue, cutting from full-blown provincial rowdiness to something hypnotically still and suspenseful without missing a beat.

| Oct 16, 2019

A Gentle Creature is an arduous watch indeed and will leave you a certain nausea that takes a while to go away. However, its mysterious ways, bolstered with a bit of psychedelic surrealism, makes it notable.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 8, 2018

A disturbing, absorbing but difficult watch.

| Nov 8, 2018

A Gentle Creature truly is a grotesque, Kafka-esque nightmare vision, a nihilistic yowl of pain.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 27, 2018

It's not an easy film to watch, packed with symbolism and references that will be lost on most Western viewers.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 18, 2018

The film gives us a rich, clammy idea of Russia's horrors as we follow a woman (Vasilina Makovtseva) into a bureaucratic hell.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 18, 2018

A Gentle Creature is too overblown with its anti-Russia stance, consistently missing the intended target of the country's suffocating bureaucracy in order to portray ordinary Russians as being as corrupt as those in charge.

| Apr 17, 2018

This challenging film requires some patience but the reward is a portrait of Russia that feels like a howl of anguish.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 14, 2018

[A Gentle Creature] is a wonderfully strange and thought-provoking cinematic experience.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 13, 2018

Putting a Grimm slant on a Dostoevskian fable, Sergei Loznitsa exposes the Russian soul to pitiless scrutiny in this gruelling odyssey.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 12, 2018

It's a fitfully interesting insight into a determined woman's fight for justice but, with its corruption and frustrating cycles of fruitless administration, this is best read as an allegory of Russia itself, which could hardly be more topical.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 12, 2018

A Gentle Creature has a warped, nightmarish-like feel anyway.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 11, 2018

Leading man Neumann is a find in his screen debut, with the looks of 'Liberty Valance'-era Lee Van Cleef.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 10, 2018

After two-and-a-half hours of punishing, brutal drama, you'll probably feel almost as battered as the poor heroine.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 10, 2018

The film, which starts out naturalistically and gradually transmogrifies into a surrealistic political fable, recounts the horrific saga of an unnamed woman.

| Sep 28, 2017

In one facet as in another, its 140 minutes of footage are insufferable. [Full review in Spanish]

| May 30, 2017

A film of unsustainable and unpleasant 143 minutes. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 30, 2017

Undoubtedly, Loznitsa uses Krotkaya as an emotional discharge, a kind of ideological exorcism. But what fault do we have? [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 29, 2017

Losnitza achieves a smooth and elegant first part that becomes too dense towards the end. [Full review in Spanish]

| May 26, 2017