Bitter Harvest

Despite the fact that it was a genocide that claimed millions of lives, the Holodomor is not particularly well known. Bitter Harvest is not the film to bring attention to it.

This is a story of villainous oppression, unfortunately told with oppressive earnestness.

It's not Zhivago. The big picture is drawn a little too hastily for that. But it is a rousing tale with political pertinence, given the current state of relations between Russia and the Ukraine.

The Cossack horseback action sequences are impressive, but there are too few shots of thundering hooves and too many scenes of stilted political discourse for this picture to take flight.

Bitter Harvest looks good, but it's a wasted opportunity to tell a story the world should not forget.

Almost inevitably, approaching the Holodomor via a standard-length dramatic feature risks reducing the cataclysm's enormity to a trivializing size and emotional impact.

It's a bad sign when even the prayers in this movie are crappy.

Bitter Harvest is both haunting and engrossing. An emotional powerhouse of a film, it is an emotionally resonant, riveting telling of history. Fear and terror is palpable. Pain is resonant.

Clearly a deeply felt film whose producers' mission is to cast a spotlight on a hidden Ukrainian tragedy, Bitter Harvest has difficulty living up to the powerful tragic sweep of its subject.

At times it felt as if it was trying to emulate David Lean's 1966 masterpiece, Dr Zhivago, although it didn't even come within a whisper of it.