‘Navalny’ Review: A Must-See Documentary About the Anti-Putin Freedom Fighter Who Has Become the Conscience of Russia

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.