'Poisoned by Polonium'

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BY JOHN ANDERSON | Newsday Staff Writer

March 21, 2008

Although a first-rate investigative documentary on its own, Andrei Nekrasov's "Poisoned by Polonium" also serves as a sequel to 2004's "Disbelief," in which the director made a rather indisputable case that the notorious 1999 Moscow apartment bombings were the work of Vladimir Putin and Russia's FSB (the heir to the KGB).

In "Polonium," Nekrasov examines the 2006 London assassination - via sushi laced with radioactive Polonium 210 - of FSB whistle-blower Alexander "Sacha" Litvinenko, and indicts the Putin regime, using in-depth interviews with the victim and his wife, Marina, and building a solid, if circumstantial, murder case against the oligarchs of the contemporary Kremlin.

Nekrasov's latest is both a work of journalism and cinema. His juxtaposition of archival footage and recent black-and-white scenes, for instance, creates a visual echo of Nekrasov's plaint that nothing in the motherland ever changes, and that the Putin regime rivals the worst.

POISONED BY POLONIUM: THE LITVINENKO FILE (unrated). 1:45. At the Quad Cinemas, Manhattan.