Bitter Harvest

I did not really care for this movie. That being said; Is there really any question, after seeing this movie, why the brave Ukrainians are fighting the Russians to the death?

Americans don't know about the 1932-1933 man made famine that killed millions of innocent Ukrainian lives. We needed this film. Everyone is a tough critic. It doesn't matter if it's not a perfect movie, as it shows history to those that didn't know about this awful tragedy. 🇺🇦🙏🏻💙💪🏼

The film is impressive and is hailed by critics of the new Khmer Rouge who sincerely believe that the communists' piles of corpses smell better than the Nazis' piles of corpses

I enjoyed the movie. I am glad I watched it because as well as being entertained I learned things I had never even heard about. I would recommend it.

The directing is so ridiculous as to be an outrage at the Ukrainian genocide. (Mauro Lanari)

Apparently critics really hate films that cast light on the crimes committed by their beloved Communist regimes.

Violent, disturbing, and bleak. There's nothing remotely interesting about this dull drama that left me depressed.

The two lovers Yuri (Max Irons) and Natalka (Samantha Barks), are struggling with their kurkul grain farmer families to survive as Joseph Stalin's collectivisation campaign and purge of the independent grain farmers and their property and other crops is confiscated by Stalin's Red Army and henchmen in the Soviet Ukraine during the Soviet famine of 1932-33. Actions that claimed millions of Ukrainian lives and hundreds of thousands of Kulak and anti communist resistors deported to Siberia slave camps and Gulags and executed en masse for nationalism and trumped up charges. Yuri, an artist from a family of revolutionaries, slowly becomes entangled with the anti-Bolshevik resistance at school in Kyiv after an escape from prison, while his family and childhood sweetheart Natalka are crushed by Stalin's policies at home. He must go back to his village to defeat Commissar Sergei (Tamer Hassan) on his family farm... Bitter Harvest received generally negative reviews. Rotten Tomatoes consensus states, "Bitter Harvest lives down to its title with a clichéd wartime romance whose clumsy melodrama dishonors the victims of the real-life horrors it uses as a backdrop" Sheri Linden of the Los Angeles Times called the film "utterly devoid of emotional impact". Several reviews agreed that the film would raise awareness but did not do justice to the subject matter, with Peter Debruge of Variety stating that "there can be no doubt that the events deserve a more compelling and responsible treatment than this." The Sydney Morning Herald called the film "a rousing tale with political pertinence", and George Weigel of the National Review wrote that "the film, while perhaps not great cinema, succeeds in personalizing the Holodomor and reminding us that this genocide happened". Michael O'Sullivan wrote for The Washington Post, "The Holodomor - an early 1930s famine in which millions of people in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, are said to have died when their foodstuffs were confiscated by the central Soviet government under Joseph Stalin - could have made for a tale of great, stirring tragedy on the silver screen. 'Bitter Harvest,' alas, is not that movie." The Ukrainian American Coordinating Council (UACC) criticized O'Sullivan's review for seeming to deny that the Holodomor was a man-made famine; The Washington Post later posted an editor's note clarifying that the Holodomor was "an act of genocide", and parts of the review were re-written. Among more positive reviews, Adrian Bryttan of The Ukrainian Weekly praised the film: "Director George Mendeluk is first and foremost a master storyteller, breathing vivid life into the nuanced characters in his epic-romance ... Richly layered and rewarding repeated viewings, Bitter Harvest is the world-class Ukrainian art film of our time." The ambition is there and the tale shines the light on a terrible moment in history during Joseph Stalin´s reign in Russia. A moment that needs its story to be communicated to the general public. Unfortunately, the film fails to deliver due to a script with a love relation that overshadows the important part of the story, a lot of overacting, wobbly direction, wobbly dialogue and fake beards. A shame, as this could´ve been something more intriguing that would rise an even stronger awareness of its historic background and do proper justice to the subject matter.

I don't really know what to say. Small kids are not usually so clean spending their all time outside. Small girls did not run in long dresses then, it's not Middle Ages. Peasants did not wear their best clothes to do harvesting. It all feels like a museum.

A great love story based on true events, The tragic history of Ukraine in the 1930s, It's the holocaust of the people in the world does not know about, but needs to know! Must see !!!