The Death of Stalin (2018)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

A great British take on a great Russian tragedy. Death of Stalin brings the humor into Moscow where it is not normally found. A surprising film that was surprisingly well made. Not that the ingredients weren't there to make a great product, but it wasn't very well advertised, or really intended for a mainstream American audience. The film hinges one hundred percent on the enjoyment of British-styled humor. From very blunt dry humor to long specific jokes that are very well explained, it is definitely not the typical American comedy. For those who can keep up, it is a real treat, for those that don't enjoy the humor, or can't understand the style, this film turns into a very hard film to watch.

The (true but slightly embellished) story of the internal power struggle among the top brass in the days following the death of Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin. When I first saw this film shortly after its release, I proposed that it was likely to be the funniest film of 2017. Now we're firmly into 2018 and I've given it a second and third viewing, I can confirm that I was almost certainly right - The Death of Stalin might not have given the most outrights laughs in a single 90-minute period as other films but it certainly left me (and, as I have read, others also) with the greatest number of memorable moments that I can still remember now. You know the ones I mean - where you burst out laughing at silence and have to explain that it's because of a scene of a man spitting onto his own forehead you saw once many months ago.The film starts immediately fast in a concert hall, escalates through Stalin's death (spoiler alert?), past the rigged committee meetings and into the culmination of plots, coups and counter-plots. It's funny enough to keep you ticking over with the occasional titter but every now and then it hits you with a proper belly laugh. Some of it is of course made up (like the opening concert hall scene) but Iannucci is keen to point out that some of its more ridiculous aspects are real - for example, Stalin's son Vasily really did try to cover up a plane crash that killed an entire Soviet Air Forces ice hockey team in 1950. Unlike with past Armando Iannucci political satires The Thick of It and In the Loop, the array of bumbling officials shown to be smart in theory but useless in practice are given real names based on real historical figures - even though the film is actually based on a French comic book of the same name. A major difference to his previous work is that the stakes are much higher when a political figure makes a political mistake - instead of the oh-so-British punishment of embarrassment, it's a bullet to the head! This makes for a handful of incredibly dark moments (mostly at the hands of Simon Russel Beale as Lavrentiy Beria, the Head of the Soviet Secret Police) but there's nothing that overshadows the trademark cutting dialogue.The unique selling point of this film is that all the actors retain their native accents for their Soviet characters - there's something strangely satisfying to hear Khrushchev's words in Buscemi's Brooklyn tongue or the feared head of the Soviet Army possessing a deep Yorkshire (Sheffield?) accent. Some have flagged this as an issue for the film but it could very well be Iannucci's way of saying that this might've happened (sort of) in 1950s Soviet Russia, but you should also expect similar schemes, plots and plans to happen in the corridors of Westminster, Washington ... or Moscow.

I loved this movie and totally unsurprised it was banned in Russia. The death of Stalin is a no holds barred historical satire. Adressing in a comically dark undertone the purges by Stalin and the NKVD in the post-war Soviet Union. Performances of note Steve Buscemi as the paranoid Khrushchev, Jason Isaacs as the uncompromising Zhukov (with unexpected yet hilarious northern accent) and Simon Russel as the head of the NKVD who scared me just watching him. Wish there were more films out there like this one. What a triumph!

I see a lot of criticism about how it's not historically accurate, it's not a history lesson it's satire and black comedy. An amusing film and intelligent film in an era of dumb down comedy movies.