The Death of Stalin (2018)

Who payed the critics

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Armando Iannucci has written and directed two films in his career, and they're both among the best political comedies ever made. First there was "In the Loop," an extension of his British TV series "The Thick of It" (he also created HBO's "Veep") that used fictional U.K. and U.S. functionaries to satirize our two nations' political dysfunction and eagerness for war. Now he returns (with co-writers David Schneider and Ian Martin) with "The Death of Stalin," a breathtakingly dark comedy of errors that holds up the brutal Soviet dictator's final days and their aftermath as a mirror to current British and American quagmires.The fictionalized plot, which hardly exaggerates the truth, comes from a French graphic novel; Iannucci and company have added comedy to it, replaying horrific events as farce, turning everyone into greedy bumblers vying to be Stalin's successor, finding grim laughs in the minutiae of his reign of terror. ("Don't worry!" says the Radio Moscow director cheerily to the audience he's hastily assembling at Stalin's command. "Nobody's going to get killed!") When a not-yet-dead Stalin is lying unconscious on his office floor, everyone who enters the room inadvertently kneels in the same puddle of urine next to his body.The masterstroke, however, is in the casting, and in the decision to have everyone speak in their native accents. So here's Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, a loud buffoon and sycophant who keeps track of which of his jokes get the best laughs; Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov, Stalin's gullible deputy (he weeps hilariously at the sight of Dear Leader incapacitated) whose idiocy makes him useful; Simon Russell Beale as Lavrenti Beria, a Cheney-like opportunist; Michael Palin as Vyacheslav Molotov, a befuddled bureaucrat who was on Stalin's to-kill list; Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov, swaggering military commander; Rupert Friend as Stalin's raving conspiracy-theorist son. Stalin himself is played by Adrian McLoughlin in a rough working-class British accent, coming across like a street thug who rose to the top of a crime syndicate.The few women who are present in all this - Stalin's daughter (Andrea Riseborough), an anti-Stalin concert pianist (Olga Kurylenko), Khrushchev's wife (Sylvestra Le Touzel), even down to Stalin's secretary (June Watson) - happen to be the only reasonable, mature people in the story. This may have been a conscious choice by the filmmakers to comment on male paranoia and competition, or it may just be historically accurate.True to form, Iannucci packs the dialogue with petty sniping and profane insults, cheerfully mining laughs from ghastly true events. It's the sort of movie where you kill a political enemy, set him on fire, and then yell obscenities at the burning corpse. (Incidentally, it's been ages since we saw Monty Python's Michael Palin on the big screen, and Iannucci's snarky-intellectual banter is a perfect fit for him.) But where Iannucci's past work has had a fly-on-the-wall documentary feel, "The Death of Stalin" is more elegantly cinematic, accompanied by classical music (Chopin, Mozart, and of course Tchaikovsky) on the soundtrack. He performs a delicate tight-rope act, conjuring thoughts of Brexit and Trump without laying it on too thick, and mocking political connivers of all stripes with eloquent savagery.

I didn't dislike The Death Of Stalin, but frankly that's because I didn't really feel any emotions throughout watching the movie. It had good comedic moments, mostly in the first half, but I wouldn't call it a funny movie, and feel like the humor didn't really land with me the way it clearly did with many. It is an effective satire of the dictatorial Soviet state, with everyone scrambling for political favor any way possible. I liked Buscemi a lot, and Tambor was also good. Ultimately, the story just never drew me in. As the movie wore on, it wasn't as funny and was a mediocre story of a few people fighting for political support. It did a good job of capturing the political silliness of the Soviet state, but didn't do anything else interesting, making for a very average movie.

Well some of it is not historically accurate, but if you want a quick, dirty & rough idea of the period when he ruled then it was tolerable. Somewhat dark, sort of comedic lines and scenes to make the subject palatable for most viewers. Stalin was basically equivalent to an amorphous melding of the best (notorious) attributes of Putin, Kim Jong-un, Erdogan, & Trump.

I liked some of the previous Iannuci's work. After watching the trailer, and the reading the original French graphic novel, I went to see the movie with relatively high expectations. On the bright side, I really like the photography, makeup and costumes. Good work there. On the not-so-bright side, I was not convinced with the choices of the director with regards to the acting and script. The English/American regional accents did not make sense for this movie. The dialogue was not believable in a Russian seeing. I could not believe the Russian oligarchs would act like a bunch of teen-agers at the dinner in the opening scenes. Zero suspension of disbelief! Worst of all, it was not funny to watch.