{"id":2346606,"date":"2026-03-26T17:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T17:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2346606"},"modified":"2026-03-26T17:05:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T17:05:00","slug":"movie-review-two-prosecutors-is-a-perfect-nightmare-of-state-corruption-entertainment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/movie-review-two-prosecutors-is-a-perfect-nightmare-of-state-corruption-entertainment\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Review: ‘Two Prosecutors’ is a perfect nightmare of state corruption | Entertainment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sergei Loznitsa\u2019s<\/a> \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d is a nightmare of government corruption so perfectly composed that, by the time it reaches its chilling conclusion, you feel nearly as entrapped as its young protagonist.<\/p>\n

Alexander Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) is a fresh-faced prosecutor who arrives at the Soviet prison in Bryansk in 1937. This is not, you might be thinking, where anyone new to the job should be in a rush to get to. Yet before even the news of his appointment has reached this penal outpost, Alexander turns up with a note, written in blood, from a prisoner he wishes to speak with.<\/p>\n

That this note has reached Alexander is nearly as surprising to the prison warden as Alexander\u2019s unexpected presence in his office. The first scenes of \u201cTwo Prosecutors,\u201d<\/a> where a pile of prisoner letters all attesting to brutality and injustice are burned, only hint at how the note has made its unlikely way to the prosecutor.<\/p>\n

This is the height of Josef Stalin\u2019s Great Purge, when suspected dissenters and Bolsheviks were rounded up by the NKVD, the secret police, and sent to prison, to the gulag or to death. It was not exactly an opportune time for a young lawyer hardly out of college to stroll into the belly of Stalin\u2019s bureaucratic beast and start asking questions.<\/p>\n

Where could such an intriguing idea for a story come from? A prisoner, himself. \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d is based on a novella by Georgy Demidov, a physician imprisoned for 14 years in Soviet labor camps. He wrote the book in 1969, but it wasn\u2019t published until 2009, posthumously.<\/p>\n

Loznitsa, a leading Ukrainian filmmaker, is also not unfamiliar with Russian state violence. The director, who has lived in Berlin since 2001, is best known for stark documentaries about his native country (including 2024\u2019s \u201cThe Invasion\u201d and 2014\u2019s \u201cMaiden\u201d) as well as films about Stalinist Russia (2021\u2019s \u201cState Funeral\u201d and 2019\u2019s \u201cThe Trial\u201d). The cast also includes several Russian actors, including Kuznetsov, who left their country after speaking out against Vladimir Putin\u2019s war with Ukraine.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo Prosecutors,\u201d which debuted last year in competition at the Cannes Film Festival,<\/a> is Loznitsa\u2019s first fiction film in seven years. But the sober eye he brings to nonfiction is very much at work in \u201cTwo Prosecutors,\u201d a starkly drawn period drama of bleak absurdism.<\/p>\n

Beyond any direct lines of connection between past and present, \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d has the neatness and timelessness of a parable, one that Gogol might have written, and one that could resonate in any era where the naively courageous challenge fascism.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s cunningly, even sinisterly structured. In the first half of the film, we follow Alexander\u2019s prolonged entry into the prison. It takes countless series of doors and locks to get through, and each step is watched suspiciously by stone-faced guards. He\u2019s made to wait for hours and urged to reconsider. \u201cDo you know where your predecessor is now?\u201d he\u2019s asked. Every step forward for Alexander into the totalitarian maw is potentially one step further from his own freedom.<\/p>\n

When he does finally, stubbornly reach the prisoner, the encounter is equally foreboding. I.S. Stepniak (a tremendous Aleksandr Filippenko) is himself a former prosecutor, a Bolshevik who vividly relates his story and details Stalin\u2019s crackdown. He isn\u2019t seeking personal justice; he wants the truth out. His bruised body is evidence.<\/p>\n

Alexander, knowing local officials can\u2019t be trusted, immediately sets out to Moscow to make a report to the chief prosecutor. In the capital, he encounters just as many hallways and barriers to entry as he did in the prison; \u201cTwo Prisoners\u201d is composed like a sinister palindrome.<\/p>\n

Alexander\u2019s second passage through the layers of totalitarian bureaucracy goes similarly. He manages to get a meeting with the prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy), but we long ago knew that Alexander\u2019s whistle blow is sure to fall on deaf ears, and he is unwittingly sealing his own fate. The walls are closing in on him.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo Prosecutors,\u201d a Janus Films release in theaters, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In Russian and Ukrainian, with subtitles. Running time: 118 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sergei Loznitsa\u2019s \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d is a nightmare of government corruption so perfectly composed that, by the time it reaches its chilling conclusion, you feel nearly as entrapped as its young protagonist. Alexander Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) is a fresh-faced prosecutor who arrives at the Soviet prison in Bryansk in 1937. This is not, you might be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2346607,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2346606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Movie-Review-Two-Prosecutors-is-a-perfect-nightmare-of-state.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2346606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2346608,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346606\/revisions\/2346608"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2346607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2346606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2346606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2346606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}