The Fool (Durak)

The dialogue is broadly generalized, urgently on point, and bracing in its undisguised diagnostic fury. If you can accept its unabashed didacticism, The Fool plays crisply.

He may be saddled with an overly ironic title role, but Bystrov is terrific. His cowboy squint and dogged intelligence are enough to give you hope for Russia, although the movie certainly won't.

"The Fool" wraps its Hobbesian vision of squalor around a fable worthy of Frank Capra, but twisted to suggest a cruel inversion of Capra's inspirational allegories of humble Everymen crusading for justice and democratic ideals.

A distressing moral drama, gripping thriller and scathing sociopolitical portrait of Russia rolled into one.

Frank Capra would have approved of The Fool, a forceful Russian drama in which a lone plumber stands up to a corrupt system on behalf of the people living in a squalid apartment building.

Director Bykov's long dark night of soul is completely engrossing and profoundly alarming.

The Fool unfolds with a powerful, if appalling, logic.

The Fool (Durak) feels like a realist counterpart to Andrei Zvyagintsev's Leviathan, more accessible as mainstream drama, and more pragmatically critical of a tainted system.

The voice of the underdog finally finds a cinematic voice in corrupt, class-divided Russia.

An expose' that rises above finger pointing to create a masterpiece of tension and suspense.

It takes place entirely at night, and the dingy color palette, washed-out and intentionally drab, presents Russia as an almost alien landscape.

Drably shot and sometimes laughably on-the-nose.