Kritiken

A blazingly funny writer, Iannucci has become a great director of actors, who with slow burns and pinpoint timing turn a political burlesque into a terrifyingly timely cautionary tale.

The film looks ugly, all brown and red, and what makes it unlike Veep, Iannucci’s TV show, is that it looks worse and more decrepit than anything that would be allowed on HBO. The subquality aspects of the way it portrays totalitarianism save it from being TV instead of a movie.

The best thing that Armando Iannucci has ever done. . . . The script doesn't so much joke about dictatorship as find the very existence of authoritarianism to be one of humanity's sickest, saddest, oldest jokes—a fine distinction, but an important one, because it prevents the film from feeling exploitative, instead lending it the feeling of a lament in which the storyteller laughs so that he won't cry.

Iannucci's direction never has a grasp of either facts or consequences, falling back on the caustic byplay and revilement that works for Veep, in lieu of any sense of context (it is supposed to be February in Moscow, yet there isn't a speck of snow on the ground). The only snowstorm onscreen is a blizzard of shtick from this group of free agents who never manage to mesh as an ensemble.

It's clear that Iannucci is not going for a full-on iteration of his brand of comedy. Yes, "The Death of Stalin" is a kind of farce, but it's a mordant one. It never asks us to laugh at cruelty; it does make us laugh at the absurd pettiness and ultimate small-mindedness of the men perpetrating that cruelty. And Iannucci is a superb ringmaster.

Nobody shuts up for a nanosecond in The Death of Stalin, a wickedly gabby black comedy. . . . Expertly wheeling between total stitch and holy terror as he searches for new victims to add to his infamous list of candidates for imminent knockoff, Beria and his roster propel the movie's bitter running joke — the creation of a climate of insanity in which no one knows from one minute to the next what's real and what's fake news or, more frightening yet, no news.

The laughs come in jolts and waves in "The Death of Stalin," delivered in a brilliantly arranged mix of savage one-liners, lacerating dialogue and perfectly timed slapstick that wouldn't be out of place in a Three Stooges bit. Turning horror into comedy is nothing new, but Mr. Iannucci's unwavering embrace of these seemingly discordant genres as twin principles is bracing.

Iannucci collapses the distance between 1953 and 2018 and Moscow and Washington in an interesting, even daring way. Despite its lavish period detail and scrupulously researched screenplay (by Iannucci and a trio of longtime collaborators), the film does not attempt to have its cast look or speak Russian, or even attempt accents. . . . If The Death of Stalin isn't as startlingly funny as [In the Loop], it's only because the mode of attack has grown familiar.

A dark comedy with an inappropriately antic tone, opening here a week after Purim, The Death of Stalin has something to offend everyone—Slavophiles and Slavophobes, The Nation and The National Review, erudite professors and historical ignoramuses, neo-Stalinists and anti-Stalinists of all persuasions. As orchestrated by the British political satirist Armando Ianucci, . . . this impressively designed, perversely enjoyable movie travesties one of the most brutal regimes in human history.

It would be a brilliant, harrowing film even without all that contemporary resonance. It's filled with the kind of rapid-fire intramural contempt that Iannucci has made his stock-in-trade: His films and shows revel in the loathing and vitriol expressed by political figures at others who are ostensibly on the same side. It's fun stuff, but in a deeply corrosive way – daring to suggest that people engaged in a soul-sickening endeavor will find, well, their souls sickened.

The script, adapted by Iannucci, David Schneider, and Ian Martin from a French graphic novel, has its insights into the stark contrast between authoritarian ambitions and the shoddiness of life in Soviet Union under Stalin. . . . The situational humor is more varied than in In The Loop, even if it still largely comes down to a lot of people badgering each other in hallways, offices, and banquet halls. But the dialogue lacks the earlier film's vicious, creative, lighting-fast profanity.

In the first fifteen minutes, even before the generalissimus suffers his brain hemorrhage, Iannucci paints perhaps the most accurate picture of life under Soviet terror that anyone has ever committed to film. . . . Iannucci shows something that few people understand about Stalin's reign and its aftermath: that it was both terrifying and ridiculous, and terrifying in its ridiculousness.