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MovieMail's Review
Attack on Leningrad is a gritty, unflinching war drama about the notorious siege, which lasted for more than two years and played a pivotal part in World War Two.
Beginning with a barrage of bloodshed that recalls Saving Private Ryan, the film quickly establishes its historical premise: the Nazis will try to break the will of the people by blocking food supplies to the city. In days, Leningrad should be on its knees. Mira Sorvino plays a journalist who's stranded in the city as the blockade begins; Gabriel Byrne is the lover who thinks her dead.
The film articulates the human cost of the siege by focusing on one household – a female soldier (Olga Sutulova), an ageing actress, a devoted mother and two young children – along with the woman they shelter, the displaced Sorvino.
The big budget allows director Aleksandr Buravsky to paint on a broad canvas, creating a ravishing, appalling, snow-covered Leningrad – its picture perfect winter grandeur an incongruous setting for mass slaughter. The film is also a showcase for the crop-haired Sutulova. She's tremendous as a firm patriot whose humanism gets the better of her.
1941: World War II rages on; the Nazis have succeeded in taking over half of Europe and part of Russia - until they reach Leningrad. After failing to take the city after a four-month-long offensive in 1941, Hitler surrounds the city for three years in order to starve three million people to death. In the midst of this horrific siege, a young English journalist, Kate Davis, finds herself among surviving Russians.
