The first half is quite accomplished and includes rare discoveries with its black humor, but during its second half (especially at the end), this morally and symbolically heavy tragedy grows pretentious and solemn... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 26, 2023

Portions of the work accurately reflect life and reality, but social facts and pressures, like a gravitational force, bend much of the film in false and deeply disoriented ways.

| Feb 12, 2021

Zvyagintsev elaborates a social labyrinth where he puts forward the effigy of the chronicle of a Russian people led by a wholesale bureaucracy far from morality. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 26, 2020

Leviathan is not only a beautifully shot film, but a successful protest, even if all its characters fight the law and lose.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2019

Andrey Zvyagintsev succeeds in cinematic sublimity with this multilayered and operatic exploration of the crushing corruption of an unchecked regime.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 19, 2019

This documentary views industrial slaughter with ferocious intimacy. It also batters the optic nerve with dizzying syncopations of light and dark. So it's hard to watch, but equally hard to forget.

| Jul 31, 2019

Leviathan, the latest movie from Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, asks many questions, but the one it revolves around is a simple one: "Why, Lord?"

| Jun 30, 2019

Leviathan truly is a sight to behold, a purely sensory experience and one of the most visceral films ever made.

| Original Score: 9.5/10 | Jun 29, 2019

Leviathan starts slowly and you can occasionally feel its hefty running time but after the raucous and game-changing drunken barbecue, secrets are exposed and the drama becomes engrossing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 31, 2019

Leviathan is veiled in a crude approximation of beauty thanks to Phillip Glass's rousing symphony and the tenebrous cinematography of Mikhail Kirchman that is at once anatomical, and at the same time deeply poetic.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 3, 2019

...Zvyagintsev expands the intimate drama into a larger ensemble piece, pushing up the run-time, encompassing a wider range of tones, and stretching out the themes in search of grandeur.

| Mar 18, 2019

...Zvyagintsev expands the intimate drama into a larger ensemble piece, pushing up the run-time, encompassing a wider range of tones, and stretching out the themes in search of grandeur.

| Mar 18, 2019

The film is riveting, visually and dramatically. It is also precise about Russia...

| Mar 7, 2019

Leviathan is a beautiful but bleak film.

| Aug 28, 2018

Zvyagintsev grants unrelenting, painstaking attention to the human drama that underscores Leviathan, but at the same time - as the name suggests - there are much bigger things going.

| Aug 25, 2018

What makes the movie sting is its savage political portrait of a present-day Russian culture that, like Leviathan, threatens to swallow up everyone in its path.

| May 16, 2018

It piles on the bleakness to numbing effect.

| Feb 16, 2018

The dumbest thing about Andrey Zvyagintsev's new snoozer, Leviathan, is his commitment to that title.

| Nov 18, 2017

If Leviathan is a masterpiece... it's a masterpiece of political pessimism. The end of history has arrived and it is in post-Soviet Russia.

| Jul 19, 2017

It's a film packed with symbolism and big questions of the kind that can stew in a viewer's head for days, even weeks afterward.

| Jun 23, 2017