State Funeral broaches the fear and the massive mistakes Russians allowed in the Stalinist regime, but it reflects upon a world where tyranny is forgiven for the same reasons: a structure of convenience and money. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jul 27, 2022

Loznitsa redoubles reality because not only does he reincorporate real images (with impeccable colorization and sound editing work), but he orders and edits them as the person in charge of filming that state funeral would have edited them.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 30, 2022

Packed with the faces of consternation and tears of despair, State Funeral is both remarkable and tedious.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 23, 2021

This weird, dirge-like artifact, whose real drama is nearly all off-screen, provides a disturbing illustration of mass indoctrination...

| Jun 4, 2021

Both as film and as history, "State Funeral" stands as a canonical work.

| May 29, 2021

In the loony seriousness of it all, "State Funeral" isn't spectator sport - it makes us active observers of a scary machinery, something to file away.

| May 29, 2021

A found-footage documentary that captures life in thrilling, painstaking detail in the hours and days after Stalin's death.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 21, 2021

The faces are the most intriguing thing. Loznitsa gives us a montage of inscrutability and repressed anxiety.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 19, 2021

We can only hope that a substantive reckoning from both sides of the political spectrum will soon be part of our national conversation. Loznitsa's documentary shows that it is possible.

| Original Score: 8/10 | May 11, 2021

I look forward to the footage used in State Funeral being repurposed to make a real movie, but this is not it.

| May 10, 2021

A film like State Funeral is a warning. History has lessons for us about what does, and does not, work, in politics, in leadership, in culture itself. We would do well to listen. We would do well to watch.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 7, 2021

The pedantic nature of the ending feels especially detracting on account of the film's 132-minute runtime and its repetitive thoroughness.

| Original Score: C+ | May 6, 2021

Loznitsa's massively ambitious oeuvre, which attempt to process Eastern European history through cinematic conjurings of one kind or another, has a new contender for most engrossing entry.

| May 6, 2021

A haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.

| May 6, 2021

With a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting-but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be.

| Original Score: B- | May 5, 2021

A time capsule of a strange moment in history, State Funeral is a glimpse into the world of a cult of personality that seems incredibly alien and scarily familiar at the same time.

| Sep 5, 2020

Sergei Loznitsa's 135-minute triumph is a beast of a film and one with its roots firmly in Soviet documentary... a herculean effort of archival dumpster diving

| Original Score: A | Aug 24, 2020

The cumulative effect is to encourage distrust of state-sponsored imagery in any form, and to suggest that, under the spell of the right official narrative, we too might be moved to authentic tears.

| Jul 17, 2020

As presented, State Funeral conjures a vision of gaslighting on an unimaginable scale-impossible to consign to history's dustbin.

| May 1, 2020

Through an inconspicuous editing strategy that makes irony emerge little by little, State Funeral exposes the pathetic absurdity of collective adoration.

| Apr 25, 2020