Aedonerre I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

DipitySkillful an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Asif Khan (asifahsankhan) 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.

adamradley 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!

g_venturi 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.

banzanbon This is one of those films that will stay with you for a long time, if not forever. Nothing about it is excessive; everything fits so well together: from the acting, to the cinematography, pace, editing, music, down to the closing credits.What's marvelous about it is that it's as true to the historical timeline as can be and it's written pretty straight, but because it's a true story, and it's such a horrible one that it plays as a dark comedy, as well as a farce. Except...it's not! If it was a work of fiction, one would say that it would be almost a 'morality play' but again...it's not. It's a film all history, politics and film buffs should see. The only reason why I'm giving it 9 stars and not 10 is because it was too short. Another 10 minutes on the film which I'm sure was shaved off, would have possibly offered better story arcs and details.