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Bitter Harvest

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Canada · 2017
Rated R · 1h 43m
Director George Mendeluk
Starring Max Irons, Samantha Barks, Terence Stamp, Barry Pepper
Genre War, Drama, History, Romance

Set between the two World Wars and based on true historical events, Bitter Harvest conveys the untold story of the Holodomor, the genocidal famine engineered by the tyrant Joseph Stalin. The film displays a powerful tale of love, honour, rebellion and survival at a time when Ukraine was forced to adjust to the horrifying territorial ambitions of the burgeoning Soviet Union.

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What are critics saying?

40

Arizona Republic by Bill Goodykoontz

Bitter Harvest, bless its low-budget heart, means well. But George Mendeluk’s film, about the Holodomor, the forced famine and starvation that killed between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians, falls well short of its ambitions.

30

Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov

It’s a history lesson wrapped up in a romance, gallows grim but far too often unnecessarily heavy-handed in a way that drives home the factual historical horrors it portrays while somehow managing to feel like a sizably budgeted but no less maladroit television movie of the week.

40

Village Voice by Pete Vonder Haar

A subject like the Holodomor demands something more than a TV-movie aesthetic and pitched battle scenes featuring a couple dozen combatants.

50

Boston Globe by Peter Keough

As the film darkens, it intensifies its focus on tragedy and atrocity and begins to do some justice to one of the largest and least known genocides in history.

50

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

Bitter Harvest never amounts to more than a colorful misfire, a picture with much of the pageant of the period, but little of the roiling passions that dominate politics in the Breadbasket of Europe, even today.

38

The Seattle Times by Tom Keogh

Despite the stakes, Mendeluk can’t scare up any particular urgency, largely because everything is so contrived and inauthentic.

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