80
These iconic images seem endowed with a sort of “livingness,” as if they have acquired special powers.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
Composed 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.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
This 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.
67
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
With 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.
100
Both as film and as history, State Funeral stands as a canonical work.
80
Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney
Loznitsa’s essay raises questions about the nature and ideological mechanisms of totalitarian myth-making, and the nature of public grief as propagandist display.
80
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The faces are the most intriguing thing. Loznitsa gives us a montage of inscrutability and repressed anxiety.
90
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
Ukrainian 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.
88
RogerEbert.com by Sheila O'Malley
A 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.
80
A fascinating and invaluable document for all of its considerable run time, State Funeral is an occasion worthy of the title.