80
Gracia succeeds brilliantly in delivering a chilling warning about where Putin and his spooks might go next, by giving Fedor full licence to act the biblical prophet.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
100
The Russian Woodpecker is very much like Fedor himself — eccentric as hell, smart as a whip, and, at the end of the day, a heartbreaker.
80
Deftly cramming a terrific amount of history, breaking news, personal drama, culture and context into a trim runtime, The Russian Woodpecker is surprisingly inventive, even buoyant in its presentation of several issues that could scarcely be more sobering.
100
In the end, it doesn't matter if you believe Alexandrovich's story that a $7 billion weapons system was ultimately the cause of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown; what matters is that Alexandrovich believes it so completely. And through his eyes (which seem to bug out outside of his skull), the entire Russia/Ukraine relationship takes on a vivid, personal immediacy.
70
Los Angeles Times by Gary Goldstein
The documentary The Russian Woodpecker is provocative, spooky and just a little nutty.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Leslie Felperin
Director Chad Gracia’s The Russian Woodpecker offers a wild ride through Ukrainian and Soviet history.
75
RogerEbert.com by Matt Fagerholm
The post-apocalyptic landscapes captured by the courageous lens of cinematographer Artem Ryzhykov are deeply chilling, especially when Alexandrovich stumbles upon a classroom littered with gas masks.
58
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
The Russian Woodpecker is ostensibly an investigative documentary, but there’s precious little investigation; its primary subject, Fedor Alexandrovich, is peddling a hypothesis for which he offers no tangible evidence whatsoever.
60
The New York Times by Nicolas Rapold
Whatever the facts, Mr. Gracia’s messily structured film works best as a document of fear in today’s Ukraine and as a kind of ghost story about the Soviet Union.