Two Prosecutors

Criterion Premieres

Summoned with a blood-written note smuggled out of a prison block, an idealistic Soviet prosecutor (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) pushes past the jail’s leery authorities to interview an elderly, broken-down Bolshevik (Alexander Filippenko) condemned as a political undesirable. The young attorney, determined to expose this miscarriage of justice to the authorities in Moscow, soon finds his efforts stymied as an ever-tightening net of suspicion encircles his investigation. Set at the height of the Great Purge and drenched in the paranoia of Stalin’s police state, the latest triumph from director Sergei Loznitsa is a chilling, Kafkaesque thriller about the impunity of power and the matter-of-fact horrors of totalitarianism.

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