Review: 'My Undesirable Friends: Part II Exile' extends a scary story of journalists on the run

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Set us as preferred Last year’s best documentary never left us because Julia Loktev’s epic “My Undesirable Friends” is back for a similarly excellent follow-up we need now more than ever.If you saw “Part I: Last Air in Moscow,” which tightly followed fierce, dedicated dissident Russian reporters pushing against the lies and violence of Putin’s dangerous rule, you’ve surely been on pins and needles for “Part II: Exile,” which is no less engaging, if more emotionally intense.

And if you haven’t seen “Part I,” which is currently on the streaming service Mubi, what are you waiting for?Waiting, of course, is what none of Loktev’s featured Muscovites had time for when “Part I” ended with the news of Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.A crew of one, Loktev had fortuitously been in Russia’s capital off and on for months, training her iPhone on a coterie of young, primarily female journalists, many of them working for the country’s last independent TV channel, TV Rain.

They’d been declared “foreign agents” by Putin as a vise-tightening scare tactic, yet that hadn’t cowed these online-savvy, deeply sourced correspondents, as “Part I” unforgettably showed through grit, humor and an after-hours camaraderie that bestowed an intimate, sustaining vibrancy, like a meaningful hang with your coolest, smartest, bravest pals.But with the onset of war entrenching their status as perceived enemies of the state, safety demanded they vacate Russia immediately, while their sense of mission compelled them to keep mining truth from the outside, wherever opportunity and necessity led them.Still, rootlessness takes its toll, along with isolation and national guilt (could they have done more?), plus the creeping sense that as long as Putin’s far-reaching vengeance persists, they are i...