Film Review Bitter Harvest Variety. TV spots for Bitter Harvest claim that the movie reveals Russias darkest secret. Thats a catchy pitch for a thoroughly over baked and blatantly fictionalized 1. Russian sentiment has reached its highest point since the Cold War. The scandal in question is the Holodomor which is not a secret at all, but rather a widely recognized atrocity through which millions of Ukrainians died of starvation as a direct consequence of Joseph Stalins policies. Like last years Kirk Kerkorian backed The Promise, which aimed to be the Doctor Zhivago or Armenian genocide epics, Bitter Harvest represents a form of ambitious generations later vindication, for which artists of Ukrainian decent writer director George Mendeluk, co writer Richard Bachynsky Hoover and producer Ian Ihnatowycz  joined together to expose horrific crimes that went suppressed for so long. And while Bitter Harvest will undoubtedly serve to raise awareness, there can be no doubt that the events deserve a more compelling and responsible treatment than this. The way such movies tell it, the tragedy of genocide  like that of the Titanics sinking  is that it tears couples apart. Never mind the countless casualties, these cynical big screen retellings seem to say It takes a standard issue unrequited romance to make audiences care about disasters, whether natural or manmade. Share this Rating. Title XMen Legends II Rise of Apocalypse Video Game 2005 8. Want to share IMDbs rating on your own siteIf you eat a plantbased diet, you dont get an automatic getoutofheartdiseasefree card. Theres definitely such a thing as vegan junk food. But a new. Why Early Access For the final steps of polishing and balancing a multiplayer game, nothing substitutes for hearing about the experiences of actual players. To use cheats, you must configure your game to allow cheats After opening up the game launcher. SONG NAME IS UZICKO KOLO STOP FUCKING ASKING The mod httpwww. This page last updated 30 October, 2016 0718 PST. Log of recent changes Disclaimer The information listed below is about a game that is still under development. Hack .Org. In this case, Mendeluk concocts a simple minded love story between a peasant farm boy named Yuri Max Irons and his childhood sweetheart, Natalka Samantha Barks. Yuri has been wild about Natalka since he first laid eyes on her  before I grew up and learned that dragons were real and evil roamed the world. Clearly, disillusion awaits the young man, whom we first meet splashing about in clear streams and running through golden fields with Natalka and his pals. Then Stalin who is portrayed by Game of Thrones extra Gary Oliver like one of the bushy mustachioed dictators from the Naked Gun movies, bellowing, Lenin was too lenient. Syphillis had softened his brain decides to collectivize Ukraine, issuing a decree by which the state seizes control of the privately owned farms and redistributes the republics rich grain harvests to other parts of the Soviet Union. Here there seems to be some disagreement among historians. Without lending any credence to the crackpot deniers, its far from clear that Stalin intended to starve the Ukrainians to death others believe that poor implementation of bad policies were to blame, though Mendeluk and Bachynsky Hoovers screenplay imagines the worst  which doesnt necessarily make them wrong, though it certainly feels reductive and one dimensional on screen. Upset with reports of Ukrainian uprisings and resistance, Stalin orders that 9. Who in the world will know As if to illustrate that boast, on a train to Kiev, Yuri meets a journalist who is arrested and beaten for trying to report the truth. No film can undo the harm of such horrors, though that isnt necessarily the aim. Rather, movies like Bitter Harvest serve to demonstrate that victims cannot be silenced and that history will judge such monsters as the villains that they were. Unlike his Bolshevik defying father Barry Pepper and grandfather Terrence Stamp, sensitive young Yuri who looks like he has never experienced so much as a blister in his life believes he can fight battles using music and words. And though neither of his elders is long for this world, Yuri will use art to get the upper hand  as in the scene in which he plunges a broken paintbrush into the jugular of a Russian officer. Frankly, Bitter Harvest seems more than a little confused about its own stance on nonviolence, treating Yuri as a peacenik whos pushed too far. Game Cossack Full' title='Game Cossack Full' />After a hasty marriage, he ships off to Kiev to study art, but learns a more important lesson when his teacher is thrown in the gulag for critiquing Yuris too perfect, propaganda friendly style. Instead, he encourages his class to capture the world honestly which, of course, is what the filmmakers believe they are doing with this manipulative melodrama. Mendeluk, who has worked almost exclusively in television, directing episodes of Miami Vice and the Lonesome Dove series, embraces the larger canvas here. There are stunning visuals of figures walking beneath the blades of giant windmills and an uprising in which rebels set fire to a wooden church, as well as small Eisensteinian touches a nod to Russian formalism, as when a soldier strikes Natalkas mother and the camera cuts to the loaf of bread she was carrying, now lying broken and bloodied on the ground, while the orchestra conveys the sweeping intention of his vision. And yet, he seems incapable of drawing nuance from his ensembles performances. Pepper and Stamps characters are defined by their strange oseledets hairstyles like a Cossack Mohawk, shaved on the sides and long on top and even odder accents, while local Bolshevik tyrant Sergei Hassan is a cartoonish brute who slaps around priests and rapes the local women. As Yuri, Irons is meant to undergo a formidable transformation, first losing his innocence, before becoming a revolutionary action hero, but mostly he just looks bewildered, a handsome face overwhelmed by whats happening around him  which would be fair, considering how difficult resistance would have been. But Bitter Harvest seems to care less about his fate or that of the countless countrymen starving around him than whether he ultimately gets the girl, and because it never convincingly establishes the romance, audiences will give a collective shrug to the entire affair.