Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Keira Brennan The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

rosemacaskie17 An important film, the question are you inactive through boredom or apathy is central to the plot though the theme is easier for me to understand as, wait for things to happen or control your life. It is important for people to take a active part in life and in this film Leon Bronstein finds the students letting fate do as it may with them and gets them to take a hand in their lives and the world around them. This theme appears everywhere in life and this film helps clarify it by showing how you can change things and why you should do so. This theme appears in psychology, be responsible for what happens to you, for example, also a woman from Africa, talking on CNN, said, you must not wait for things to happen but make them happen, a message women, more given to accepting their lot, need to hear. The film also links getting the students to take an active role at school to sexual abuse at schools, another important topic, the hero says that, had sexually abused children had a student union they could have stopped the abuse. Even in school people are in danger. The theme of bullying in school and abuse is very big just now and Bronstein does face and defeat bullying not by saying things will get better, which is wishful thinking but by effective and complicated action, which I judge to be a more real way to deal with things. rose macaskie

DarthVoorhees I loved 'The Trotsky' it is the kind of teen comedy we seldom get, one that acknowledges the hardships of being a teenager but that is also very funny and intelligent. Teens aren't stupid and it seems that many screenwriters think they are. 'The Trotsky' is as much a story about adolescences as it is about teenage brand Bolshevism.Leon Bronstein believes he is the reincarnation of the great hero of the October Revolution Leon Trotsky. I'm sold. It's a brilliant premise and it's execution is seamless. Director Jacob Tierney asks the audience to take a leap of faith. Leon is so convinced of his lineage that he pursues a woman named Alexandra who is ten years older than him because Trotsky did so. This relationship is tricky but I think what makes it work is Jay Baruchel's utmost commitment to the role. He does appear very childlike and this is essential to the brilliance of the story. The teen years are hard and in his uncertainty he turns to Trotsky, the brilliant hero of Bolshevism who was bold and conquered history. Bronstein is questioned about the unsavory details of Trotsky's life such as his infamous murder with the 'ice pick'. The way Baruchel responds is so brilliant, he thinks of Trotsky's life as an adventure which he gets to live through. The way Baruchel delivers this line is funny, uplifting, and even a little sweet. Bronstein wants the whole package; even to the point where he asks a classmate if he is "my Stalin". By all means Leon Bronstein is the kind of character we would expect to be beaten up by cliché jocks but the approach by both Tierney and Baruchel is to create a character driven by passion. Bronstein believes he is Trotsky to the point where others are dragged into his fantasy and I think this satisfies some of the more questionable elements of the script.Not knowing about the Russian Revolution will not hurt your appreciation of the film but it is much funnier if you have some idea about what went down. Tierney has done his homework and the film can become a great inside joke for anyone the least bit familiar with Soviet history.

Greg In Jacob Tierney's The Trotsky, Jay Baruchel plays Leon Bronsetin, a 17-year-old student who believes he is the reincarnation of former Soviet hero, Leon Trotsky. Leon believes so strongly of his re-embodiment that he models his young life around the history of the 20th century Soviet leader including his relentless pursuit of an older woman by the name of Alexandra that he believes is his fate to wed.Leon's first confrontation based on his unfounded notion of birthright comes at his father's factory where Leon begins to assemble the staff to stand up for their rights as employees and suggests the origin of a union. Leon is defiant of his father's intention of meeting scheduled deadlines y rallying the employees in a coup to accept the right to take a full hour for lunch even at the peril of their shipping targets. A sit-in and hunger strike soon follow to fairly chuckable results.Unamused at his son's behavior, the father (Saul Rubinek) ships Leon to public school where Leon immediately picks up the cause for those suffering from the fascist regime of the educational system. This puts Leon and his school principal (Colm Feore) on a collision course where school officials oppose Leon's determination to set up a student Union and give his classmates a voice against tyranny.The Trotsky is a mildly entertaining but far too lengthy of a film that tries to parallel a history lesson into an amusing story of a misunderstood young boy. Baruchel plays the titular character incredibly well invoking the awkwardness of a young Leon trying to fight back against rival adults countering his arguments. But unfortunately, the heavy handedness of the subject matter and length to which the single joke is expected to encompass, wears on the patience of the audience and many will be lost by the low keyed humor coupled with a slow momentum build towards an anti-climax.Too often in The Trotsky, we experience scenes that make the film uneven in tone. The 17-year-old's sexual relationship with a 27-year-old and the hostage taking of the school principal are just two samples of how the film takes a smart subject and intelligent dialogue and warps it into reels of unease. These sequences do little to help you create a bond with the lead character so that the ending might have any combined sense of accomplishment where audiences might care about the fate or future of the central character.The Trotsky isn't all bad, but one can't help but wonder who the film was made for enjoyment. Younger audiences won't care for the adult situations, older audiences won't have the patience or relate to the cause and fans of Canadian or independent film will be worn down by the lack of any real energy or force to carry us through nearly two hours of paper thin flimsiness.The Trotsky, therefore is a miss. It would have been a great short, possibly even an interesting page turner of a book, but it is hardly a film worth looking out for.

reneweddan The Trotsky is a teen-comedy with a hint of Goodbye Lenin's political satire and Charlie Bartlett's humour/plot. Although some of the acting seems mediocre, I enjoyed the film.You don't need to understand the biography of Leon Trotsky, it explains it in a subtle way that is enough to enjoy the film, but doing research beforehand might be a decent idea.Don't take this film too seriously, just enjoy it for what it is. It isn't like a normal film, it's sort of a modern teen-comedy about revolting against injustice, although the injustice is rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things.Well-done, worth watching, but only if you have an open mind and enjoy quirky films about adolescent injustice.