AVClub: Americans believe in so many preposterous conspiracy theories—Kennedy was killed by an assassin on the grassy knoll; Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings; 9/11 was an inside job—that it’s somewhat comforting to discover that other countries also engage in such patent absurdity. The Russian Woodpecker is ostensibly an investigative documentary, but there’s precious little investigation; its primary subject, Fedor Alexandrovich, is peddling a hypothesis for which he offers no tangible evidence whatsoever. The one novel aspect, given the movie’s title, is that his conspiracy theory takes a genuinely unexpected form.
