‘Donbass’ Film Review: Ukraine War Satire Finally Gets US Release

thewrap.com:

for example, a white, male film critic said he disliked “Turning Red,” a film about a Chinese teenage girl, because he found it “limiting in its scope,” I would say that that man was experiencing a personal problem, not a cinematic one. “The Goldfinch” and “Dear Evan Hansen” both bombed in large part because, unless viewers were already fans of the texts on which they were based — an 800-page novel and an unhinged Broadway musical, respectively — they were unlikely to see past both films’ inherent messiness.

I found those movies to be more successful than other critics did, but I also had requisite context going in.I am not well-versed in Ukrainian civil unrest, hence the concluding line of my first round of screening notes: “I UNDERSTAND NOTHING.”Were “Donbass” a documentary, like much of Loznitsa’s other work, then I might feel comfortable outright panning it, because then its primary job would be to explain this conflict to me.

Instead, the primary job of this film is to lampoon it. And lampoon Loznitsa does, to varying degrees of success, while explaining nothing at all.

Take the opening scene, where an actress is sitting in a makeup chair. A producer frantically herds her and her fellow players out to a concrete shelter, where they wait out a series of explosions.