The starvation of the Ukrainian people by Stalin’s Soviet government in the 1930s resulted in the deaths of between 7 million and 10 million people. The insistent, sentimental soundtrack is something out of a TV movie from 30 years ago. With the exception of Terence Stamp, who plays an old warrior, the acting is uniformly amateurish — both exaggerated and uninvested, as though the actors were left by the director to fend for themselves. By separating them, the movie is able to show the different kinds of torment to which Ukrainians were subjected. In the countryside, the communist troops systematically robbed from and starved the farmers, while in the city, political oppression curtailed free expression. [...] for much of the movie, Yuri is a political prisoner, while his wife and family are far away, getting thinner and thinner and thinner. To be fair to director George Mendeluk and his screenwriters, making a movie from this subject was always going to be difficult. [...] even accounting for the difficulty, “Bitter Harvest” is a weak effort, with nothing to redeem it save for a certain base level of competence.