Dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev · 2026 · 135 min · in French cinemas now
A provincial Russian town, 2022. Gleb, a business executive, is about to lay off his workforce when he finds out that his wife, Galina, is having an affair. That is the first act, and it is as far as this review goes. Minotaur is a loose adaptation of Claude Chabrol's The Unfaithful Wife (1969), co-written by Zvyagintsev and Simon Liashenko, shot by his regular cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, and played by Dmitriy Mazurov and Iris Lebedeva.
The critics who saw it at Cannes agree on the method. Zvyagintsev stages a marriage coming apart in long, patient takes and wide frames, and lets the camera hold on after the action has finished. Little White Lies calls him a maker of "domestic epics", and Sight and Sound describes a film built from composition and duration. The reviews also agree on the payoff: a private story that quietly becomes a portrait of a country, with the war in Ukraine pressing in from the edges rather than driving the plot.
a potent and perfectly mapped allegory for the mechanisms of Russian authoritarianism
Jessica Kiang, Sight and Sound
The two leads are praised almost everywhere. Roger Ebert's critic Godfrey Cheshire calls them commanding and exactingly shaded, and the Irish Times calls them superb. Cheshire also singles out the look of the spaces, in particular a sleek modernist house that says as much about wealth and isolation as any line of dialogue.
Not every critic is carried along. The Irish Times finds the film at its best as gallows humour, and thinks the political allegory is stretched too far when nearly every domestic cruelty is tied back to the state. Little White Lies notes that the slow, stern style can sometimes tip from weight into lethargy. Cheshire's single reservation is that the story centres on a man. If you want fast cutting or a plot that hurries, this is not it.
Where the reviews split, it is on degree, not direction. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in May, was chosen to represent France at the Oscars for Best International Film, and the aggregated critical response is close to unanimous praise. The score here reflects that: very strong, held back slightly by the reservations above.
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It opened in French cinemas on 14 October, and a German cinema release is listed for early November. Mubi holds distribution rights in the UK, Ireland and Germany, among other territories. Availability varies by country, so check your local cinema listings and Mubi before you plan a night around it.