The Fool

Mostly skipping Australian shores, the long and winding road from the Locarno competition in 2014 to the 2015 New Zealand International Film Festival has seen Yury Bykov’s The Fool(Durak)suffer from the success ofAndrey Zvyagintsev’s far more prestigiousLeviathan, another recent Russian film dealing with local government corruption. Though both films reflecting growing social unrestthroughout Russia, Bykov’s film is less a call-to-arms than a bleak portrait of a nation defeated, not necessar...