Latest news with #Politkovskaya
Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Words of War review — Maxine Peake is fearsome as a Putin critic
A muscular cast, a gifted TV director and an executive producer credit for Sean Penn lift this political biopic above its decidedly creaky limitations. This is the true-life tale of the impossibly brave Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was a committed Putin critic and in 2006 was assassinated in her Moscow apartment building. The touchstones are Veronica Guerin and A Private War. • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews Politkovskaya is played with typically fearsome integrity by Maxine Peake, charting the journalist's coverage of the Second Chechen War and her increasingly strident attacks on Putin.'The only terrorist that the Russian people need to fear is their own president,' she writes. Politkovskaya's concerned husband is played by Jason Isaacs , her harried editor by Ciarán Hinds and her nemesis from the secret police by Ian Hart. All are speaking in their own accents. This isn't a bad choice from the director James Strong (Mr Bates vs The Post Office) — nobody wants to watch a bunch of seasoned thesps rolling their Russian Rs like wannabe Bond villains — but it's not entirely successful. It clashes with the physical environment (Russian language signage, newsflashes and headlines) and occasionally flirts with absurdity, as if an Irish newspaper editor is warning a Manchester journalist about an FSB heavy from Liverpool. Other quibbles include a willowy non-role for Harry Lawtey as Politkovskaya's lachrymose son Ilya, and a sympathetic Chechen terrorist who says, 'It's an honour to meet you, Anna Politkovskaya. Back home they write songs about you.' Really? Still, it works. Peake is that good. Isaacs is also that good. And the subject is compelling and timely. The film suggests that Martin Niemöller's famous line about authoritarian regimes coming for the journalists first has rarely been more relevant (see Trump's shakedown of the White House press pool). A powerful closing title sequence, set to Radiohead's Lucky, features a collage of some of the 1,500 journalists killed pursuing stories, claims the film, in the modern era.★★★☆☆ In cinemas from Jun 27 and on digital from Jun 30 Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit to find out more. Which films have you enjoyed at the cinema recently? Let us know in the comments and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Economist
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Economist
Anna Politkovskaya knew that tyranny respects no borders
'The entrance is well adapted for murder,' Anna Politkovskaya wrote in 2003, 'with dark corners in which you are your own rescue service.' She was describing the building in which a fellow journalist had been bludgeoned, but also foretelling her own death three years later. The assassination in her apartment block is the inexorable ending of 'Words of War', a new film about her life and fate. Politkovskaya's story and warnings are vital even now, amid the carnage in Ukraine. Especially now.
BBC News
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Anna Politkovskaya's persona was much greater'. Slain Russian journalist's sister on 'Words of War'
The thriller about slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Words of War, opens in US cinemas today. The filmmakers took into account some of the inaccuracy concerns about the script raised by her family, Politkovskaya's sister Elena Kudimova told the film is coming out just in time for the World Press Freedom Day. Words of War was produced by Sean Penn. Anna Politkovskaya is played by Maxine Peake, and one of the leading male roles is performed by Jason of War tells the story of legendary Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya. In Russia, her name is synonymous with courage and an indomitable spirit. She rose to prominence for her investigations into human rights abuses in Chechnya - a region in southern Russia that fought two wars for independence in the 1990s and early 2000s. Her older sister, Elena Kudimova, describes her as "someone who, despite all the threats and the danger to her life, kept doing her work until the very end."Politkovskaya openly criticised the Russian authorities and President Putin himself. Despite receiving numerous threats over the years, she refused to back down. Her sister recalls that while Politkovskaya considered emigration, she always changed her mind at the last moment. She would say: "I can't leave because nobody else will help the people here." Reporting the war in Chechnya From 1999, Politkovskaya traveled to Chechnya almost every month for several years. Kudimova recalls that for many wronged and desperate people, Politkovskaya became "the last resort" - the one who could make things right. She took part in the negotiations for Nord-Ost, the 2002 hostage crisis at a Moscow theatre, after the Chechen rebels specifically requested her. In 2004, she hoped to help resolve the crisis in Beslan, where heavily armed militants held hostages in a school for three days. However, she never made it there - she was poisoned on the plane while en route to 2006, Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. Six men were convicted over the murder, but the person who ordered it has never been identified. Her sister Elena doubts that the mastermind will ever be brought to justice. "If they had wanted to find him, they probably would have done so by now," Kudimova adds. Avoiding clichés Before the film's release, Politkovskaya's family raised concerns about the Words of War script, believing the film took too many liberties with the truth. While the filmmakers insist that the drama is based on real events, they emphasise that it is not a biography. However, Politkovskaya's sister notes that the filmmakers did take the family's feedback into account, and certain scenes that raised the most questions were removed from the final cut."[Anna's son] Ilya was portrayed in the original script as a sort of womanizer, [and in the film] Anna doesn't have a romance with [Dmitry] Muratov," she said. Dmitry Muratov, a Nobel Prize-winning journalist, was Anna Politkovskaya's former colleague at the Russian newspaper Novaya to Kudimova, Maxine Peake portrays her sister accurately, though she believes Anna's personality was "much greater and more complex" than what is depicted on screen. "Her real life had far more dramatic episodes than those shown in the film," she criticised the film's setting for leaning too heavily into cold-weather clichés. "I was struck by the fact that it's constantly snowing, as if Russia has only one season. In reality, we have all four." However, Kudimova is grateful that the film helps preserve the memory of her sister. Anna's legacy Kudimova said that Anna never thought about her own legacy. She recalled how, at some point, someone had suggested Anna write an autobiography - she was in her 40s at the time. Anna had laughed at the idea, saying it felt more like something you do when you're a hundred. But then she came up with the idea of writing six short stories. At the end of each, she said, she was supposed to die - but didn't, for different reasons. And they were going to be funny stories. When asked about how Anna would want to be remembered, Elena says that her sister did dot think about her legacy: "She simply wanted to live."Words of War will be released in the UK on 30 June
Washington Post
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Words of War' commemorates the courage of a Russian journalist
The fact that an infinitesimal fraction of people who line up for the latest Marvel superhero movie will bother to see a drama about an actual hero is enough to make a person sick to their soul, but I guess it's understandable. There's no dazzling CGI in 'Words of War' — no stalwart, spandexed action figures flying through the air to land nuclear uppercuts on the villain of the hour. There's just one woman: Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who went up against the villain of our age and paid the ultimate price for it. That's a warning and, in the movie's moral long view, a dare. Would you do what she did? Would you wait until there was no other choice? Would that be too late? The film's a British production directed by a veteran of British TV, James Strong, and it's meat-and-potatoes stuff as moviemaking goes, doughty and dutiful in following the career of Politkovskaya from the onset of her reporting on the Second Chechen War to her assassination on Oct. 7, 2006 — Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday. British stage and TV actress Maxine Peake plays Politkovskaya with an intense focus that earns the trust of Chechen fighters and their families while alienating her own husband (Jason Isaacs) and grown children (Harry Lawtey and Naomi Battrick). A movie about a crusading journalist needs a larger-than-life editor to support her, to shield her from the higher-ups and to deliver a big, shouty monologue about the pressures he faces, and that's Ciarán Hinds as Dmitry Muratov, head of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. When 'Words of War' opens in 1999 — after a teaser flash-forward to the 2004 poisoning that nearly killed Politkovskaya — the paper's early 1990s founding with financial help from Mikhail Gorbachev is receding into the past. Putin, a former KGB boss, has just become prime minister. As rebels in the Chechen Republic make their second bid for independence and the Russian response grows more punishing, Muratov sends Anna to the capital city of Grozny to write about what she finds, telling her: 'We don't need a war correspondent in Chechnya. We need a people correspondent.' The relationships the reporter subsequently builds with a wary Chechen rebel named Anzor (Fady Elsayed), a young woman named Fatima (Lujza Richter) and others allow her to journey further into the country and document the Russian armed forces' torture and massacres of Chechen civilians. 'This war is not being fought to rein in a rogue republic,' Politkovskaya reports back to her readers in Russia. 'This war is being waged to advance the interest of one person, a president intent on becoming the type of leader Russia thought it had left in the past: a vain, brutal, power-hungry authoritarian.' This is not the kind of journalism to please a dictator, and the warning signs come quickly enough to label Anna a bear-poker with a death wish. That she becomes a voice to be trusted and listened to not only in Chechnya but increasingly to the public in Moscow and beyond only ramps up the threat she represents. 'Words of War' — terrible title, that, and an earlier one, 'Anna,' isn't much better — doesn't cut corners to comfort an audience. Eric Poppen's screenplay is frank about the costs that come with being a reporter's source and frank, too, about the ways in which Politkovskaya's status as 'the one Russian the entire Chechen population trusts' allowed her to be used as a pawn for the government's own ends. The hostage dramas at Moscow's Dubrovka Theater in 2002 and the Beslan school in 2004 testify to the rebels' desperation, Putin's disregard for human life, and Anna's growing distress, fury and stubbornness. Peake is perhaps best known to U.S. audiences for being chased by robot dogs in a 2017 'Black Mirror' episode, and 'Words of War' is only slightly less dystopian in its portrait of a society increasingly gripped by a macho paranoia that can find one determined woman journalist anathema to its very being. The film's a necessary downer that nonetheless inspires in a viewer an echo of its heroine's compassion and resolve — qualities to carry forward as the evil that Politkovskaya documented continues to spill past the borders of her country. 'Your children will not judge you on whether you made the world a better place,' Anna responds to her son's entirely understandable pleas that she back down from holding the powerful to account. 'They will judge you on how hard you tried.' R. At AMC Hoffman Center 22. Contains violence and language. 117 minutes. Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Words of War' Review: Portrait of a Fearless Reporter
The sort of movie in which a story's inherent power is enough to oil otherwise creaky biopic machinery, 'Words of War' dramatizes the life of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who became known for her tenacious reporting on the second Chechen war and for her undaunted criticism of Vladimir V. Putin. The movie opens with an apparent attempt on her life — a poisoning on an airplane — and ends with her death in 2006, when she was murdered in her Moscow apartment building. In between, it recounts the tremendous risks that Politkovskaya (played by Maxine Peake) faced in finding and persuading people to talk. When she travels to Grozny, she has difficulty earning the confidence of Chechens, who believe that no Russian reporter can be trusted. One says that she is trying to illuminate 'the black hole of the world.' The Russian military eyes her warily, too (a major threatens to slit her throat), and soon an agent (Ian Hart) visits her while she is getting coffee and a croissant in Moscow — to make it clear he's keeping watch. The closing credits acknowledge that the filmmakers (James Strong directed a screenplay by Eric Poppen) have taken some dramaturgical liberties, including inventing the Hart character. Politkovskaya's own description of serving as a hostage negotiator at a Moscow theater in 2002 differs in tenor from the portrayal of events onscreen. Some deviations are inevitable, but the expository dialogue — and the convention of having Russian characters speak English, with British accents — are distractions. Even so, Politkovskaya's bravery, and Peake's commitment to honoring it, is enough.
