Atlantis

Mr. Vasyanovych's approach is literally and figuratively visionary. One aspect of the vision is its treatment of machinery.

Vasyanovych and his actors manage to make this parable both heartening and stupefying.

Sergiy's dead-eyed quality is mirrored in the film's style. Scenes typically play out in a single take, the camera set at a fixed distance and blankly awaiting catastrophe.

The film's use of scale to drive home the absurdity of its characters' actions sometimes calls to mind Werner Herzog's tragicomic existentialism, as well as early silent cinema.

This is a strong piece of poetically pure art-house cinema that finally offers a ray of hope for humanity's future - not just the Ukraine's, as this largely depoliticized statement is one of universal relevance.

[A] dark yet humanly luminous story.

...In the midst of this left over desolation and barren land there is hope and, possibly, love. It is a strange but compelling story.

Despite some artistic merit and admirable intentions, Atlantis left me as cold as the barren Ukrainian plains depicted in the film.

Filmed in an exaggerated widescreen in a series of single long takes, often static, Vasyanovych uses the horizon to contrast before and after, in one sequence three horizontal perspectives moving in opposite directions.

Visually shocking. [Full review in Spanish]