A shame, then, that it doesn’t jab hard enough. Still, the ensemble cast is mostly very good; Jason Isaacs is especially fun to watch as the macho Georgy Zhukov, reimagined with a Yorkshire accent. Andrea Riseborough as Stalin’s daughter, one of the film’s scant female characters, is the weak link, though her Svetlana is not quite funny enough on the page. The stakes are higher in Stalin’s universe, with verbal blunders met by bullets rather than Iannucci’s favoured (and very English) punishment of stinging, crippling embarrassment. The tone ends up being oddly serious, the comedy bleak rather than black, and the final product is somehow both more sombre and less caustic than Iannucci’s sharpest, silliest work.

Source: The Guardian October 22, 2017 06:56 UTC