A GENTLE CREATURE (KROTKAYA) World Cinema

An unnamed Russian woman receives a package she’d sent to her incarcerated husband, stamped with the frustrating words “return to sender.” So begins this woman’s descent into the bureaucratic hell of the Russian penal system, as she travels to a Siberian backwater where the prison fortress stands. Her requests to see her husband are rejected by the wardens, and she can’t even receive a clear answer as to whether he’s still being held there. Sergei Loznitsa’s masterful epic A GENTLE CREATURE watches with patient rigor as its title heroine faces one indignity after another, increasing in unease and danger, while persistently trying to peek behind the curtain of a shadowy institution where everyone loses — and where, if you are allowed to enter, a looping nightmare awaits. – Beth Hanna