Review: 'Give Me Liberty' is a brilliant madcap farce on wheels
"Give Me Liberty," Kirill Mikhanovsky's wonderful second feature, unfolds over an especially fraught day in wintry Wisconsin. It features a large ensemble that consists almost entirely of nonprofessional actors, many of whom imbue their characters with the depths of their own real-life experience. Several of the actors are members of Milwaukee's Russian immigrant community; others are regulars at the city's Eisenhower Center, a vocational training program for people with disabilities.
With its rough-hewn realism and its unglamorous, careworn faces, Mikhanovsky's film is what you might call, in the tired parlance of the entertainment industry, "a small movie" - a catch-all term for low-budget independent cinema that, in this instance, is nearly as condescending as it is
