The Death of Stalin

Armando Ianucci has become one of the premier satirists of our time, with "The Thick of It", "In The Loop" and "Veep" parodying contemporary politics in all of its vainglorious, self-seeking, shallowly minded, petty infighting glory. "Death Of Stalin" uses the title incident to show that all that jockeying for position, bitter insults and sleazy maneuvering is pretty perennial. While, yes, the stakes are in some ways higher (though "In the Loop" had a war being declared in the background), and the characters venality definitely gets more brutal (particularly Simon Russell-Beale's spymaster Beria), the combination is still pretty familiar.

I was slightly at a disadvantage when I saw this - it was a surprise film at Fantastic Fest, meaning that an audience primed for weirdness and spectacle instead got a sarcastic british historical comedy - therefore, for a comedy, it didn't arouse many laughs (in the theatre I was in anyway - I'm told in some of the other theatres the chuckles were continuous). And to a certain extent, with the stakes this high the laughs tend to stick in your throat a little more than they might otherwise - you know that for many people this is literally life and death we're playing with. Fortunately, as bitter drama this really works - Steve Buscemi's scheming Kruschev, Beale's aforementioned Beria (Beale is largely a stage actor and here finally gets a chance to show why he is one of the premiere actors of his era - this is the first time his power's really been captured on film, and I hope it's not the last), Jeffery Tambor's buffonish Malenkov, Jason Isaac's blunt Field Marshall Zhukov and a plethora of other actors capture the desperation of people manovering for their chance to stay close enough to power to not get killed tomorrow.

If I don't rate this quite as highly as "In The Loop", that may be due to the lower level of laughs and the slight familiarity of the style - but this is still strong, caustic cinema well worth watching.