Critics reviews

Polsky relies too heavily on subtitled exposition laid over gimmicky imagery of newspaper clippings, bombarding with graphics and facts. None of this is helped by Christophe Beck's score (he of Frozen fame, now a go-to composer for ice-related feature films), which jockeys the film along at an uneven pace, dramatically under-scoring the film's already-unbalanced and hyperactively edited emotional beats.

Red Army starts off unpromisingly... Fortunately, director Gabe Polsky has a personal relationship with his subject, which helps him to settle down and tell a rich and highly engaging set of stories.

As Soviet communism reached a dead end in the 1980s, Soviet ideals remained alive and well in the form of the nation's hockey team, the Red Army, who were world champions for most of the decade. This engaging documentary provocatively suggests that the team succeeded in large part because of communist indoctrination. Trained to think as a collective, the team was unbeatable...

Emotionally charged, viscerally exciting and consistently enlightening, Gabe Polsky's "Red Army" is a sports documentary like no other. Though it centers on an elite Soviet hockey team of the 1980s and ‘90s, it uses that lens to refract one of the most crucial geopolitical developments of the last half-century: the East-West confrontation between two powerful ideologies that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and a subsequent world order dominated by the United States and its allies.

Gabe Polsky's ingenious, touching documentary Red Army looks at the other side of this myth, the seemingly faceless, allegedly robotic players who made up the Soviet team. There, Polsky finds a story even more epic and powerful than the Miracle on Ice.

The Soviet era is more interesting than the NHL years, but still, the film is entertaining even for ardent nonfans.

Red Army, though, transcends a typical sports doc when it takes on the schism of heroism at home versus a natural gravitation toward Western freedoms... Polsky is sometimes awkward in his questioning, but he spurs his interviewees to serious reflection and even nostalgia.

Polsky presents his resulting move after retiring from the NHL—returning to Russia to take on a position as the country's sports minister—with a mixture of bitter irony and humane empathy. In light of Vladimir Putin's recent antagonism of both Ukraine and the world at large, one could accuse Fetisov of aiding "the enemy" with his return, but Polsky's quiet yet welcome achievement is to allow us to see the individual amid the politics, clearly and sympathetically.

A riotously fun record of the fortunes of the Soviet Union's all-conquering ice hockey team in the Cold War-riven 1980s. Polsky's film has all the ingredients – including a compelling central figure (Slava Fetisov, the taciturn but dry-witted star player), swashbuckling style, and plenty of humour to complement the political exegesis – to make it a breakout hit.

I wasn't at all taken by Red Army, a tricked-out, bells-and-whistles documentary that's so determined to entertain people who don't ordinarily watch documentaries that it condescends to both its subjects and the audience (so much use of Cyrillic as super-cool design, so much stereotypically Russian music, so much riffing on the Cold War as a groovy spy-tastic time).

A breezy gloss on the outsize importance of sports during the Cold War, Red Army stops lobbing even softball questions at its main interlocutor, Slava Fetisov, the Soviet team captain, about his career off the ice... But the wholly reverential treatment shown Fetisov by Polsky could hardly be said to be reciprocated: The subject's occasional displays of disdain for his director... prove to be Red Army's most illuminating moments.

Polsky did his homework, culling through archival footage for impressive material from the height of the success of what was officially called the "Green Unit.