Death of Stalin

[didds]

I watched this on the suggestion of a mate. Well... its different!

Another stellar cast, intriguing quasi-documentary style story of the days immediately following Stalin's death. Fairly slapstick and daft in nature.
Steve Bucemi plays Kruschev to give you a flavour of the casting, Michael Palin plays Molotov.

the only thing that grated with me was the open accents - the director wanted to avoid Russian accents rather than "insult" Russians (or whatever) which apparently went down well in Russia, though not well enough to permit it a licence to be shown there! So we instead get Kruschev with an American accent, and most of the rest of the central; committee with varying British accents. Just came across as odd. But its a persoanl thing.

7/10, worth a watch.

Caveat: there are some, if not openly brutal scenes, very very heavily implied brutality including murder, torture and rape/sexual assault.

didds

[IShouldCoco]

I actually thought the accents worked really well.

Rather than doing some pathetic Anglo-Russian pastcihe ("Vot iz diz....") you have Paul Whitehouse as his usual chirpy cockernee type and a superb Jason Isaacs as a Yorkshire Marshall Zhukov. I can only assume he modelled himself on Sean Bean from his 'Sharpe' days and it makes for some very funny scenes.

A great film for me and it deserved a wider audience. The cinema trailer was a little misleading as it presetned it like a comedy when as you say, there are elements of history, tragedy and plenty of violence.

[djbenedict]

I thought this was very good. The 'accents' thing is clearly personal, I liked it. Have thought about the film quite a bit since watching it a week ago, usually a sign of a good film. I think the black comedy works quite well for the subject matter.