81
Metascore
10 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100VarietyJay WeissbergVarietyJay WeissbergBoth as film and as history, State Funeral stands as a canonical work.
- 90Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleLos Angeles TimesRobert AbeleUkrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s clinical and fascinating 135-minute assembly of this priceless archive is a categorically weird, thrillingly immersive distillation of four days of official, cultish pomp and mourning for one of the 20th century’s biggest monsters.
- 88RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyRogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyA film like State Funeral is a warning. History has lessons for us about what does, and does not, work, in politics, in leadership, in culture itself. We would do well to listen. We would do well to watch.
- 80The New York TimesA.O. ScottThe New York TimesA.O. ScottComposed entirely of footage shot at the time in various parts of the Soviet Union, the film is a haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.
- 80The GuardianPeter BradshawThe GuardianPeter BradshawThe faces are the most intriguing thing. Loznitsa gives us a montage of inscrutability and repressed anxiety.
- 80The Irish TimesTara BradyThe Irish TimesTara BradyA fascinating and invaluable document for all of its considerable run time, State Funeral is an occasion worthy of the title.
- 80Film ThreatFilm ThreatThese iconic images seem endowed with a sort of “livingness,” as if they have acquired special powers.
- 80Screen DailyJonathan RomneyScreen DailyJonathan RomneyLoznitsa’s essay raises questions about the nature and ideological mechanisms of totalitarian myth-making, and the nature of public grief as propagandist display.
- 70The Hollywood ReporterDeborah YoungThe Hollywood ReporterDeborah YoungThis cannily edited selection of rare archive footage reveals the peak of the people’s mind-born terror, and it is the beginning of the end.
- 67The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyThe A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyWith a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting—but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be.