Review – Come and See

This is a hard movie to watch for a handful of reasons. It’s grim and depressing, though of course that’s exactly what you’d expect from a brutally accurate depiction of Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front in 1943. Occasionally the flow falls victim to Socialist art school conceits. And why are Russian movies so hard on the cows? I think this is a tradition that dates back to Eisenstein’s Strike. No SPCA in the Soviet Union in 1985, I guess. But if you can get past the rough spots, this is an important production. When 30 million people die, someone ought to make a movie about it. And overall this one’s quite good. The nightmare of the village destruction sequence easily rivals anything from Hollywood holocaust movies. Worth seeing