The second film in a double bill showing ( The Party (15) precedes this film at 6.30pm ). The double bill ticket price is £7.00
2017 ( France | UK | Belgium ) ( Comedy, History )
DIRECTOR: Armando Iannucci
STARRING:Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor
‘The Death of Stalin’ is an outrageous and brilliant historical satirical farce.
Written and directed by the wickedly talented Armando Iannucci, it’s a fiercely sharp attack on the self-serving scheming and idiocy of the ruling classes. We meet Stalin on bullying form in 1953 in a Moscow that’s alive with paranoia and purges. But before long, the much-feared dictator is lying comatose on the floor after a stroke sparked by a brave citizen’s angry letter of protest. As Stalin wanes, hastened by the fact he’s sent all the competent doctors to the gulag, potential successors leap into the vacuum. What follows is a riotous farce of doublespeak and plotting laced with moments of bitumen-black horror. Iannucci’s control of tone is such that we’re carried from hilarity to revulsion and back again in a few keenly crafted lines of dialogue. It’s much darker terrain than his comic dissections of US and British politics, ‘The Thick of It’ and ‘Veep’, uncomfortably so at times. The result is an original, troubling, deadly serious comedy.
(1hr 46min)