Liberation: The Break Through (1970) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by Jon🐬 ★★★★

  Still a weirdly paced collection of sorta vignettes draped along the framework of a major battle with distinct starting and stopping dates like the first one, but something about this one worked for me more. The moments of avant-garde music, the needlessly complex long takes, the absolutely horrific moment where they cut to a man who has been paralyzed on the battlefield, and we hear his terrified last thoughts as the Nazis are about to drop bombs overhead.

• Review by sschol ★★★★½

  beautiful ending! its great how there even manages to be moments of comedy, and romance, in the nightmare. the meeting of the minds towards the end is the stuff of legsnds...

• Review by Joseph Pallas ★★★½

  Composed through the same empirically motivated perspective as the previous film in Ozerov's Liberation series, The Fire Bulge (or Arc of Fire as I've also seen it translated, The Break Through is more competent cinematically is it forgoes much of the excessive labeling that film employed and instead presents each the historical material in an almost self-contained vignette format where the individual characters don't matter as much as the actions of the groups that they represent do. There are scenes that don't follow this methodology though they stick with well known historical figures that need no introduction. The opening scenes of a beleaguered Hitler scolding an animated Mussolini are interesting from a historical angle and comical enough to make them…

• Review by veronica ★★★★½

  that river crossing with the boat tachankas was scary as fuck. the stalwart spirit of the red army...I really dont need to watch a western WW2 movie ever again. stalin's swagger while he was owning churchill!!!

• Review by Yury ★★★★★

  This is consistent with the great quality of the first. Great depiction of events and as always a compelling watch. Not much more to say it's a strong entry in a great series.

• Review by drahdinedum ★★★★ 1

  "Band of Brothers" from Russia;-)

• Review by Edward Anderson ★★★★★

  One of the benefits of being a communist one-party state is that you can channel as much public funding into the production of as many genuinely impressive epic war dramas as you want without any redress from the taxpayers, whose money might have instead been spent on food or heating fuel.

  It is undoubtedly true, though, what Hemingway said about the Soviet war effort: that the world owes the peoples of the Soviet Union an unpayable debt for their unmatched contribution to the destruction of the Nazi war machine. The spine of the Wehrmacht was broken in the east; never let anyone tell you otherwise. The Soviets suffered the unbearable loss of what little they had left to call their…

• Review by Sam ★★★½

  Ich hab diesmal mehr mit den Charakteren mitgefiebert als im ersten Film, da ihnen zumindest etwas mehr tiefe und menschlichere interaktionen gegeben wurde, anstatt sie komplett wie schablonen wirken zu lassen. Auch die szenen in denen es Vorrangig um Taktik und Politik ging, haben mich mehr abgeholt. Ich bin generell sehr beeindruckt von dem Mut, Figuren wie Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Rosevelt und chruchill einzubauen. Das hätte ziemlich nach hinten los gehen können aber der cast und die Inszenierung lassen es relativ natürlich wirken. Apropos beeindruckend, natürlich sind auch die Schlachtszenen wieder extrem beeindruckend und generell gefällt mir der visuelle look sehr. Es ist ein Film, der sehr von seiner Stimmung und der Inszenierung lebt (die btw nicht nur im Spektakel…

• Review by IceTea69 ★★★★

  “Looks like Uncle Joes beat us 1-0”

  You got to appreciate the classic Moggingthat Stalin pulls on Churchill in Teheran.

  Asides from that in part 2 we are given the rescue of Mussolini, Dniper Crossing, Battle of Kiev and the Teheran Conference.

  We end off with a send off to the boys heading into 1944 to clap some Nazis.

  Also where is the Oscar for the Casting Department??

• Review by Daniel Alves ★★★★½

  -Camarada Stalin botando banca
  -Odeio o fato desse filme estar com um pôster diferente do resto

• Review by ZED ★★★½

  Men, fear, death, love, honour and country

  Huzzah to the Heroes and the actors that portrayed this struggle against Total Annihilation

  The use of practical effects can't be underestimated the Soviets knew how to make a battle like you're actually there

• Review by Puffin ★★★½

  While I do believe many of the issues with the original film carry over into this one - mainly a stoic and impersonal grasp of humanity - the growing sense of detail and scale benefits this sequel greatly. Not to mention that the war sequences here are even more extravagant and gorgeous without losing its harsh sense of urgency and fragile mortality. If anything, its increasing size does favors for a film that can witness so much destruction and carry forward by the hundreds, understandably and even hauntingly indistinguishable figures. Absolutely comparable to Bondarchuk in its most imposing moments, though its aversion to the abstract is closer to Waterloo or They Fought for Their Motherland than it is to War…