Dear Comrades!

[T]hese crisp, high-contrast images speak to another impulse as well: to look into a past shrouded in the fog of delusion and doublespeak, and to see through it with a clarity that burns and even heals.

It's Konchalovsky regular Vysotskaya who stays with you, as a complex heroine whose utopian Soviet dream is gradually unravelling. It's a remarkable performance at the center of a devastating film.

The script is filled with flat, rhetorical speeches that are done no favors by Konchalovsky's static direction.

Setting political movies in the past is an easy, usually safe way to signal virtue. But with its eerie resonances of 2021 reports from Moscow to Washington D.C., this monochrome aesthetic object looks like something that draws real blood.

"Dear Comrades!" may not make perfect sense of the past, but it goes a long way in allowing people to look at it with a clarity that manages to be exacting and compassionate at the same time.

Throughout, Konchalovsky juxtaposes wide-ranging events with seemingly insignificant details to dramatic effect.

It's a fascinating subject for Konchalovsky to take up late in life...

It's not a "masterpiece," but the reflection of political bewilderment makes Dear Comrades feel like a life lesson.

Carried out in a flowing visual manner, Dear Comrades is both cold and moving.

With its ironic title, "Dear Comrades!" honors the victims, revealing the horrors, first investigated (with no convictions) thirty years later and, to this day, with some unmarked graves.