Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
'Leviathan' is structured as an intimate suspense story, with a Job-like hero on whom all sorts of hell will be visited by an uncaring state.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Nothing will surprise Zvyagintsev fans more than discovering how funny the film is, as the helmer and co-writer Oleg Negin extend the darkly satirical streak they began with Elena.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The movie expands, breathtakingly, into mordant humor, impenetrable mystery, ferocious satire and classic tragedy.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
This is a whale of a movie, grotesque and a little bloated but impossible to ignore.

Name : Joe McGovern / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
What emerges is a Putin-offending critique of how the power-abusing state and the power-worshipping church collude to create millions of Jobs.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Director Andrey Zvyagintsev puts contemporary Russia, as up-to-the-minute as Putin and Pussy Riot, under the microscope. Leviathan is a stupendous piece of work that transcends language and borders.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Filled with a desolate beauty.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Many conversations start and end around a kitchen table. Why, then, should we be left with such an impression of grandeur, limitless suffering, and wrath?

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
This is really a movie about a feeling, or really, about a lack of feeling - about what happens to people in a dominant culture of bullying and abuse, when they have no escape except what's inside the next bottle, no options except not waking up.

Name : Graham Fuller / Alias : New York Daily News
A bleak, beautiful, and bitterly funny parable of post-Soviet Russia.

Name : Farran Smith Nehme / Alias : New York Post
Director Andrey Zvyagintsev's film combines allegory, brutal melodrama, black humor and strikingly beautiful compositions, each frame dense with meaning.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
The heart and soul of Leviathan is Serebriakov's Kolia, who carries deep sorrow in his eyes and on his shoulders, even as he fends off defeat for longer than you'd imagine possible.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Bleak and relentless as well as impeccably made, biblical in its name as well as its moral outrage at the powerlessness of the individual in the face of unchecked authority, "Leviathan" is dealing with nothing less than the current state of Russia's soul.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Despite flashes of absurdist comedy from some secondary characters, the movie closes around you like the fist it protests and laments.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
Leviathan is another downer, but it's considerably looser and livelier than its predecessors, verging at times on black comedy.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Andrei Zvyagintsev's fourth feature is a thriller, a black social comedy, and a thinly veiled swipe at Putin's regime in one tidy package.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
For all his failings, Kolya, in the movie's terms, is a natural man, and so his fate in fighting his implacable enemies in the state has a mythic resonance. The movie would not be as powerful as it is if he were haloed.