Kamila Valieva is cleared for the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
26.01.2022 - 06:09 / variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticThere’s an extraordinary scene in the middle of “Navalny,” a must-watch documentary that tells the inspiring, scary, and profoundly important story of Alexei Navalny, the vitally popular Russian opposition leader who, as a presidential candidate, became such a threat to Vladimir Putin that the Kremlin tried to poison him. Most of the documentary, which was unveiled as a last-minute “surprise” entry in the U.S.
Documentary Competition slate at Sundance, was shot in 2020 in Germany, where Navalny, tall and ruggedly handsome, with piercing blue eyes and a caustic intelligence (he’s like Daniel Craig’s towering boxer brother), holes up after the poisoning and tries to investigate what happened to him.He teams up with the lone-wolf Bulgarian journalist hacker Christo Grozev (known as Bellincat), who in scenes worthy of a “Bourne” thriller is able to suss out the identities of the men who tailed Navalny to Tomsk, all on different flights, as part of an FSB hit squad. Armed with this information, Navalny, who’s a master of media (his YouTube show has millions of followers and he has posted hundreds of TikTok videos, some with 50 million views, that document the corruption of the Russian state), arranges for the exposé of his poisoning to break at the same moment all over the globe on Dec.
14, 2020. That morning, he makes a call to each of the men responsible, pretending to be a Kremlin higher-up wanting to know why the assassination didn’t go as planned.
Amazingly, one of the men — Konstantin Kudryavstev, a chemist who helped to orchestrate the operation — is fooled by Navalny’s ruse and admits, right over the phone (and on camera), to all of it. (“We did it just as planned, the way we
.Kamila Valieva is cleared for the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping helps open the Winter Games in Beijing on Friday, dozens of world leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also are expected to attend.
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A drama about an undocumented nanny in New York City, a documentary about three exiled dissidents from Tiananmen Square and another doc about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny won top prizes at the Sundance Film Festival. Winners were announced Friday evening in a virtual ceremony.
A drama about an undocumented nanny in New York City, a documentary about three exiled dissidents from Tiananmen Square and another doc about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny won top prizes at the Sundance Film Festival. Winners were announced Friday evening in a virtual ceremony.“Nanny,” from writer-director Nikyatu Jusu and starring Anna Diop and Michelle Monaghan, won the Grand Jury Prize in the drama category for its depiction of a Senegalese immigrant working for a wealthy family in New York City.
Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThe virtual Sundance Film Festival concluded with a virtual awards show — no host this year, just a series of statements and videos parceled out across two hours by Twitter. It was a strangely anti-climactic way of wrapping a low-key festival, while giving winners a chance to prep polite, crew-inclusive acceptance speeches.Among the audience prizes, U.S.
NEW YORK -- Within hours of Russian authorities officially adding Alexei Navalny to the country’s registry of terrorists and extremists, a new documentary about the imprisoned Russian opposition leader premiered at the Sundance Film Festival."Navalny” was dramatically added to the festival at the last minute, and announced just the day before it premiered virtually Tuesday evening at Sundance. Directed by Daniel Roher, the film was made with Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic, in late 2020 and early 2021 while he recuperated in Germany after an attempted assassination with nerve agent poisoning.Navalny has said the Kremlin was responsible, as have American intelligence officials and media reports that traced the agents who attacked Navalny to Russia's Federal Security Service.
poisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday. Called “Navalny,” it’s a no-holds-barred indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, and insists that Navalny’s close brush with death was the result of a secret state-run operation to assassinate him.“As I became more and more famous guy, I was totally sure that my life became safer and safer because I am kind of famous guy — and it will be problematic for them just to kill me,” Navalny, 45, says in the film. “I was very wrong.” The doc, heading to HBO Max, was added at the last minute to the Sundance slate just as Putin had stationed more than 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border.
Alexei Navalny, Russia’s highest-profile opposition figure, perennial thorn in Putin’s side and currently a guest in state prison, gets a vigorous up-close-and-personal look in this eventful, fest-moving, never-a-dull-moment documentary from Daniel Roher. A collaboration between HBO Max and CNN Films, Navalny, provides a sustained look at a good-looking, articulate and seemingly unafraid family man who came very close to being murdered on August 20, 2020 by what were quite clearly politically hired killers. The privileged access provides the opportunity for an international public to get a handle on a driven personality who consistently said things very few others are willing to risk. Anyone who follows contemporary international politics will eat it up.