The Death of Stalin

Wow, this was a great film. If you've read Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita' this is a film in the same vein. Poking fun at some of the unfunniest personages and most corrupt and brutal events in human history. Since tyranny fears satire and parody, more is better and let no one or no subject be off limits. That is the essence of freedom.

One of my all time favorite movies, I only ever heard about it because I’m a huge history nerd, but oh man am I happy I did. Characters and plot are engaging, humor is subtle, but very funny, and all the events are very much true to life with only a couple of embellishments or exaggerations. An awesome movie for anyone with a dry sense of humor or a love of history.

Need some Steve Buchemi and laughs.

This is my favorite film of the year. I chuckled throughout, only to interrupt myself by laughing out loud. The writing is sharp, brilliant, and darkly comic. It reminds me of the best political comedies of Vaclav Havel, Tom Stoppard, and Monty Python.

Uneven pacing along with hit and miss jokes. I love everyone involved with this film so I should have loved it but it was a chore to get through...

There are comedic elements to the film, it seems to want to be a comedy, but there aren't that many jokes, and they aren't enough to overcome the darkness of the subject matter. We have bumbling politicians competing for power, but the backdrop is Stalist purges. You can't just casually make light of mass murder. Compare with, say, Mel Brooks turning the Spanish Inquisition into musical extravaganza, which works because it's absurdly over the top. The Death of Stalin is also missing the ideological bite of Dr. Strangelove. The characters here are watching American movies and gratifying their sexual desires, very bourgeois. Ironically, I found the main interest of this film to be historical. It's not totally accurate, of course, but it's an adaptation of real events in Soviet history, so it's fascinating from that standpoint. I rented the moive for 99 cents and thought it was well worth that, but it seems somewhat overrated in the tomato meter.

Even for 99 cents to rent this movie, I felt ripped off. There is literally not one funny moment in the entire film. It seemed to me to be like a bunch of high-school students trying to make a film, except in this one, they decided to splice together the parts of the film where the high-schoolers were just walking around between takes. How any movie critic could like this film is beyond me.

Awful.

Brilliantly executed film about an absurd time in human history. It is a comedy- a very dark comedy. If you enjoy Brazil, you will enjoy The Death of Stalin — even more so because the latter is (more or less) based on actual historical events. Admittedly, there had been some amplification and embellishments, all in the service of a tight film. But hey, it’s just a movie after all. And a ripping good one at that.

Really funny, however I assume it is highly inaccurate(it is a comedy). I’ll admit the characters took a while to manifest, but the movie as a whole is really funny. Definitely worth your time.