Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.
Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers' attitude toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking. Read full review
Nadezhda Markina is splendid as Elena, who speaks little but still manages to make her thoughts and emotions crystal clear. Read full review
Elena reveals a filmmaker in full command of his art and not much interested in catering to an audience. If you want this film, you have to meet it more than halfway. Read full review
Beneath the noirish topicality of Elena, which won a special jury prize at Cannes last year, lies a bone-deep existential unease and spiritual alienation, a preoccupation with sin that is at once quintessentially Russian and wholly archaic. Read full review
Rarely do movies-never mind foreign ones, of any nationality - explore an honest-to-God ethical quandary. Elena, in its concentrated austerity, often resembles a lost chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Ten Commandments–themed Decalogue. Read full review
Backed by a sparing Philip Glass score, Elena eloquently shows how, in modern Russia, even family relationships are at the mercy of business. Read full review
It's a sort of slow-boil Russian noir, if that genre exists, and if it doesn't, it does now. It's also a statement on class discrepancy in post-Soviet Russia. Arrogance, betrayal, crime and violence are all part of the story, directed and co-written by Andrei Zvyagintsev. Read full review
There's no music to tell you what to think. It's just three good actors and one director's merciless powers of observation. Read full review
This is a quiet, powerful film about the lengths we'll go to for the sake of the people we love - and the depths we'll sink to for the sake of the ones we hate. Read full review
Shoot this film in black and white and cast Barbara Stanwyck as Elena, and you'd have a 1940s classic. Read full review
4.5
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She's gotta have it. Read full review