Synopsis
The story of Rudolf Nureyev, whose escape to the West stunned the world at the height of the Cold War. With his magnetic presence, Nureyev emerged as ballet’s most famous star, a wild and beautiful dancer limited by the world of 1950s Leningrad. His flirtation with Western artists and ideas led him into a high-stakes game of cat and mouse with the KGB.
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Cast
- Oleg IvenkoRudolf Nureyev
- Adèle ExarchopoulosClara Saint
- Chulpan KhamatovaXenia Jurgenson
- Ralph FiennesAlexander Pushkin
- Alexey MorozovStrizhevsky
- Raphaël PersonnazPierre Lacotte
- Olivier RabourdinAlexinsky
- Ravshana KurkovaFarida Nureyeva
- Louis HofmannTeja Kremke
- Sergei PoluninYuri Soloviev
Recommendations
- 80
Variety
Lovely, elegant, and curiously opaque ... The film’s many ballet scenes are stunning, to say the least. - 80
CineVue
An evocative portrait ... Fiennes utilises a good balance of biography and ballet; emphasising how much Nureyev loved to dance and why, when forced, he chose artistic freedom over love of country. - 60
Empire
An interesting, challenging mess. The White Crow offers lots that’s impressive — Ivenko as Nureyev, the dance sequences, a knuckle-whitening last 20 minutes — but can’t render it in a dramatically engaging way. - 60
The Guardian
Hare cleverly suggests Nureyev’s mixture of courage, hauteur, emotional damage and cool self-appraisal; the Soviet authorities cannot threaten him through his family because he long ago left them behind. An athletic, confident, undemanding film. - 60
The Telegraph
A serious-minded, often beautiful, utterly heartfelt character study that nevertheless lacks its astonishing protagonist’s fleet-footedness and only partly captures what made him tick. - 60
The Observer (UK)
Equally impressive is the quality of the dance on screen. - 50
Slant Magazine
Ralph Fiennes’s film too conspicuously avoids an overt political perspective. - 40
The Hollywood Reporter
Writer David Hare and director Ralph Fiennes have a good feel for the artistic world the story inhabits and professional dancer Oleg Ivenko does a more than creditable job in personifying one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artistic figures, but the narrative bounces all over the place trying to cover too much ground when concentrating on the core drama would have far better served the desired end.
