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Wall Street Journal

‘Antidote' Review: Opposing Putin on PBS

Those familiar with recent films about the lives and deaths of the Putin opposition—the Oscar-winning 'Navalny'; 'Citizen K'; several 'Frontline' exposés—will also be familiar with Christo Grozev, credited in the new 'Frontline' installment 'Antidote' with developing 'a new form of journalism that takes human sources and their personal agendas out of the equation'; Mr. Grozev calls it the 'art of reconstructing a crime based on digital breadcrumbs.' While he has appeared in several of these documentaries about the regime of Vladimir Putin, 'Antidote' casts Mr. Grozev as the lead. By every indication, he'd much prefer being a supporting player. The longtime PBS series 'Frontline' usually devotes itself to disseminating events in plain-spoken, sometimes hurried fashion, the news always threatening to outrace the reportage. By contrast, 'Antidote,' directed and produced by the British documentarian James Jones ('Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes'), is far more ambitious cinematically and in the scope of its time frame, its historical resonance and its portrayal of a journalist confronting a dictator. The threats are real; deaths occur. 'Being on Putin's kill list has led to me being separated from my family,' says Mr. Grozev, who also left his longtime outlet Bellingcat for other pursuits: In one hair-raising scene, he organizes the escape of a Russian whistleblower 'determined to tell the world how the state makes deadly poisons and targets political opponents.' The escapee has to run across a farm field and dive into a car driven by a Grozev associate. James Bond it is not. It's far more nerve-racking.