The Poet

Maybe something genius happens in the second half, something people praise it for, but I'll never know. My whole group couldn't bear it past the midpoint. It could've been just a simple, dull film, stitched together from screenplay tropes like the smoldering gaze of a mysterious woman and a visit to a fortune teller, blindly copied from Hollywood in the style of a cargo cult. But it's spiced up with cringeworthy musical montages that turn it from merely absurd into downright unbearable. Yura's good, but he's no Pushkin. The Poet falls far short of the director's other works, among them a brilliant fifty-second Reebok ad.