Ralph Fiennes’ ‘The White Crow’ starts out slow and meandering, but its grand finish is so good that it makes you forget all the problems you had with it before. Directing from a fragmented screenplay by David Hare, we only get  glimpse of Rudolf Nureyev. We see he is sort of a badass rebel, and we see his brilliance as a dancer – Fiennes has cast Oleg Ivenko, who is a great dancer in real life, but we really don’t get a full character. Why was he such a rebel? We see here that he had affairs with both men and women, but his bisexuality is skirted upon (I read that his heterosexual relationships all had personal motives)  We see he is some kind of an a–hole, but Ivenko is all business that we don’t see the charm that the real Nureyev had for him to have gotten away with all that he did.

But that last twenty minutes or so is fantastic. Of course we know how it will turn out, but getting there is so suspenseful and fun – and for my money, worth the wait.  And now I want to learn more about Nureyev, as I knwo there is a companion piece documentary that came out as well.