Note: I was hired to write a handful of short reviews for a “social justice” documentary film festival held annually at a Vancouver university, and when it ran, this review of its headlining title was truncated and edited to the point of incoherence. Below is the full, unmolested piece, which is still far more tepid and equivocal than I would have liked. So much for walking the line. In Vancouver media, there will be no deviation from the progressive hallucination, which is really a corporate-state death agenda dressed up in relentless PR and sanctimony. It’s like living with an abuser when everyone under your own roof is silent. Naturally, this awful film went on to win the Oscar for best doc, telling you more than the sum of all the words below.

In 2020, Russian dissident and “opposition leader” Alexei Navalny was allegedly poisoned during a flight to Moscow, an event met with outrage by Western observers. Central to this fast-paced doc is a sting operation, caught on camera, during which the recovered Navalny poses as a security official and coaxes an admission from one of the FSB perps responsible for the botched assassination attempt. It’s thrilling stuff and, wow, what an embarrassing blow to Navalny’s mortal enemy Vladimir Putin! If only it was real. The film is produced by CNN, which is inseparable from the US State Department, and should be approached with heavy skepticism and maybe even a pair of tongs. While nobody here is defending the Putin regime, Navalny glosses over its subject’s association with right wing extremists—a mysteriously common trait among American-backed political figures—and neglects to mention that his partner in this ripping investigative yarn, the “independent” news agency Bellingcat, has been exposed as a US-Anglo natsec operation and faithful PR department for NATO interests by journalists including Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal of the GrayZone. It’s depressing that western progressives have been so effectively manipulated into a new and dangerous era of Russophobia and alignment with the desires of US Imperialism, and Navalny—the man and the film—both belong to that enterprise. Directed by Daniel Roher, who ably handled Robbie Robertson and the Band’s story in 2019’s Once Were Brothers, Navalny is exciting like a Tom Clancy novel, and probably just as fictitious.

Unpublished, February 2023