I enjoyed this so much that I screened it twice, back-to-back. British comedy vet Armando Ianucci (Veep, The Thick of It) directs an astounding cast of comic actors, Michael Palin and Jeffrey Tambor among them, in this adaptation of the graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, bringing the darkest of farces to the paranoid, internecine power struggles inside the Kremlin in the wake of dear leader’s death. (And his brief resurrection, followed by his death again.) Adrian McLoughlin plays Uncle Joe as a vicious cockney wide boy, but the film belongs to Steve Buscemi’s needled reformist Nikita Khrushchev and his most dangerous rival, head of secret police, Lavrentiy Beria—invested by the great Simon Russell Beale with a Penguin-like physicality and a genius for instilling fear alongside the more everyday regimen of murder, torture, and rape. Amazingly, given the talent surrounding him, Rupert Friend’s drunken lunatic cad Vasily Stalin almost walks off with the picture.

Georgia Straight, March 2018