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Review: The Slapstick Horror of ‘The Death of Stalin’

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By Manohla Dargis

March 8, 2018

The comedy of cruelty is rarely funnier or more brutal than when it comes from Armando Iannucci, a virtuoso of political evisceration. A comic talent who should be household famous, he is best known for “Veep,” the HBO series about Washington politics that was a satire when it first hit in 2012 but now seems like a reality show. He also directed the movie “ In the Loop ,” an aptly obscene burlesque about the run-up to the Iraq War. He only seems to have abandoned contemporary politics in his latest, “The Death of Stalin,” an eccentric comic shocker about a strong man and his world of ashes and blood.

The laughs come in jolts and waves in “The Death of Stalin,” delivered in a brilliantly arranged mix of savage one-liners, lacerating dialogue and perfectly timed slapstick that wouldn’t be out of place in a Three Stooges bit. Turning horror into comedy is nothing new, but Mr. Iannucci’s unwavering embrace of these seemingly discordant genres as twin principles is bracing. In “The Death of Stalin,” fear is so overwhelming, so deeply embedded in everyday life that it distorts ordinary expression, utterances, gestures and bodies. It has turned faces into masks (alternately tragic and comic), people into caricatures, death into a punch line.

The movie opens in early March 1953. The iron-fisted Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), 74, has ruled the Soviet Union for decades and racked up countless crimes against humanity and millions of victims. A near-monosyllabic thug with a helmet of steel-gray hair and a retinue of flatterers — Khrushchev and Molotov are among the names crowding this familiar roll call — Stalin likes classical music and old westerns, a casual reminder that barbarism and civilization are often partners in crime. Squirreled away in a dacha, a relatively modest woodland retreat at a remove from the Kremlin, Stalin kicks back with his toadies only to fall grievously ill later that same evening.

He briefly hangs on, gasping but mute, throwing his nominal comrades in arms into a fast-spiraling panic. The most appealing, or rather the least obviously terrible, of these is Khrushchev (a superb Steve Buscemi), the minister of agriculture and a cunning, outwardly drab schemer. Like a seasoned standup, Khrushchev tells his wife which of his jokes made Stalin laugh, an accounting that she dutifully preserves for future reference. When he learns that Stalin has taken ill, Khrushchev hastily pulls a jacket and pants over his pajamas and rushes to his side, where Beria (Simon Russell Beale, brilliant), the head of the secret police, the N.K.V.D. , has already taken up position and begun plotting.

“The Death of Stalin” is based on graphic novels by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, and Mr. Nury shares writing credit here with Mr. Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin and Peter Fellows. It’s a seamless effort that comes alive with a dazzling ensemble that includes Jason Isaacs as Zhukov, a preening military force, and Michael Palin as Molotov, a first deputy prime minister. When the story opens, Molotov has no inkling that he’s about to make a miraculous escape. Like the rest of Stalin’s men, he has helped create a world of bureaucratically administered terror, one in which each bullet to the head is rationalized on a neatly typed hit list. And now he’s on such a list.

Mr. Iannucci draws from history with its competing narratives , bending it to his purposes. Real traumas and outrages are mentioned in passing, rather than dutifully explained; there’s a brief look inside the gulag, for instance, with its desperate prisoners and splatters of blood. For the most part, though, the Stalin-era atrocities are the ghastly background for the frantic intrigue of his hangers on. Khrushchev soon emerges as one of the canniest of these survivors, though Beria moves faster and initially with far more lethal force. Soon after Stalin finally dies, Beria sends out his own kill list, embracing — as Selina Meyer of “Veep” once put it — continuity with change .

The action shifts to Moscow and assorted gruesome and grandiose interiors in which Khrushchev and the rest take turns organizing the funeral and their own uncertain futures. Karl Marx increasingly gives way to the Marx Brothers as Stalin’s son and daughter (the contrapuntal Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough) rush in to wail and thunder, adding absurdity and self-dramatizing melodrama to the mix. There are secret meetings, crowds of mourners, visiting dignitaries and more secret meetings. Mr. Iannucci is particularly good at the theater of sycophancy and at all the ways in which supplicating faces, hands and bodies can quiver in fear and with a terrible love.

“The Death of Stalin” is by turns entertaining and unsettling, with laughs that morph into gasps and uneasy gasps that erupt into queasy, choking laughs. Mr. Iannucci’s decision to have the performers speak in an array of accented English — from Brooklyn to Cockney — carries some political resonance, suggesting that totalitarianism knows no borders. But it also makes the familiar strange, creating a Brechtian alienation that few movies succeed in pulling off. Mr. Buscemi plays Khrushchev with persuasive realism, and he certainly looks the part, with his bald head and boxy clothing. But the character’s Brooklyn accent also underscores Mr. Buscemi’s identity, making him present, too.

This doubling in which both the actor and the character wave at the audience is also a familiar comic strategy, one used by the likes of Bugs Bunny and Jim Carrey. It fits for a movie in which almost all the characters have been playing variations on the same role of slavishly adoring, lethally submissive servant. Stalin hasn’t taken his final breath before Beria and Khrushchev stop playing those roles; others, like Molotov and Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), the deputy prime minister and Stalin’s heir apparent, scarcely seem to have anything left except their long-enacted performances.

In his book “The Last Days of Stalin,” Joshua Rubenstein captures the dictator’s power over the Soviet Union in a quote: “Stalin was inside everyone, like the hammer alongside the sickle in every mind.” In Mr. Iannucci’s movie, you see the hammer and the sickle in each pale, scheming face, in every prison cell and bootlicker’s smile. It’s in Beria’s every move and there when Malenkov puts on a dolorous face and a corset, setting the timer for his own end. There are times when Mr. Iannucci seems as merciless as he is funny; hope can seem very distant here. Yet he also suggests — with the help of a pianist played by Olga Kurylenko and the example of his movie — that art is one sure path to resistance.

The Death of Stalin Rated R for totalitarian brutality and gun violence. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes.

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‘the death of stalin’: film review | tiff 2017.

Armando Iannucci's satire 'The Death of Stalin,' with Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, observes the jockeying for power after the Soviet Union's longtime leader dies.

By THR Staff

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One of the funniest and most distinctive political satirists of our time has finally returned to the big screen, with a lacerating look at the regime of an overweight bully who demands unthinking loyalty and expects reality to conform to his every dictum. We’re speaking, of course, about Joseph Stalin: Having skewered 21st-century White Houses in Veep and In the Loop , Armando Iannucci got out before reality made his invented stupidities and outrages unremarkable. Fortunately for him and for moviegoers, pettiness, vanity and infighting are constants among those in search of power. Though not as stuffed with rapid-fire laughs as In the Loop — could there not have been room here for a virtuoso of profanity played by Peter Capaldi ? — this makes a very fine sophomore outing. It will more than satisfy Iannucci’s fans at arthouses ; here’s hoping we don’t have to wait another eight years to see the director’s next film.

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The Death of Stalin Reviews

The Death of Stalin is its own firing squad armed with a specialized brand of heinous hilarity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 7, 2024

In the end, the humor fades away in favor of political machinations, but the film's killer gags are still numerable. Watching them delivered by expert performers is The Death of Stalin's primary pleasure.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2023

I appear to be the rare early reviewer who didn’t dig it, so Iannucci die-hards can probably feel free to ignore me and anticipate.

Full Review | Jan 11, 2023

With caustic wit, Iannucci examines the humanity of his characters and the absurdity of their behavior with both passion and precision.

Full Review | Dec 7, 2022

Steve Buscemi is just a joy, as always.

Full Review | Aug 12, 2022

This is what great satires do: make us laugh while giving us glimpses of our own reality. The Death Of Stalin is a truly funny and absurdly smart film.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 19, 2022

The brilliance of Iannucci's limber tonal shifts is that he can switch between them in an instant, keeping a sharp audience on edge, while never losing our investment in the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 14, 2022

Politicians bumbling attempts to feign grief about Stalin's death while secretly delighted, functions as a running gag with a Python-ian flavor (heightened by Python emeritus Michael Palin in the cast) and thereby highlighting the absurdity of communism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 5, 2021

It's as mind-bendingly clever as it is completely silly.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 23, 2021

An audacious reimagining of history. Strong comic performances are highlighted in a film that is both frightening and funny at the same time.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 4, 2021

The Death of Stalin is a fatally ill-conceived "black comedy" ... The film is not so much maliciously anticommunist as it is, above all, historically clueless.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2021

Co-writer/director Iannucci handpicked these actors one at a time, and you can tell. Every actor fits the role like a tailored suit set to one ideal set of mannerisms. That's high-class skill.

Full Review | Nov 6, 2020

Filled with political correctness, the dramatic points feel way more effective than the comedy. Absolutely gorgeous production design. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 30, 2020

'This is just... wordplay,' one character exclaims, and while that doesn't come off as an intended auto-critique, it certainly could function as one at points.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 23, 2020

From backstabbing to assassination, pajamas, and concert recordings, it all seems so terribly trivial until it's all so terribly real. It's like Mean Girls, only with the fate of millions hanging in the balance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 27, 2020

The Death of Stalin strikes a tricky tone, but it rings true. The events portrayed in the film happened 65 years ago, and that distance gives us the ability to laugh at this very dark chapter in this country's history.

Full Review | May 29, 2020

A pretty good attempt at satirising the absurdities of end-game totalitarianism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 31, 2020

Everything about this movie works, particularly depicting the dictator's inner circle as a frat house. Hilarious and unsettling.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 27, 2020

It may be cringe-worthy at times, what with its propensity for showing the Soviet world of violence, torture, and bloodletting, but for those who like their parables to be challenging and salty, do not miss this exceptional film.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2019

Armando Iannucci's new film is a scathing look at vile oppression, and a heap of fun as well.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 17, 2019

Film Review: ‘The Death of Stalin’

Mixing verbal fireworks with low-brow gags, Armando Iannucci finds unlikely comedy amid the confusion following the Soviet leader's demise.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Consistently ahead of his time, political satirist and “Veep” creator Armando Iannucci — who forecast a female President that was not to be — has been developing “ The Death of Stalin ” since long before the current swell of anti-Russian sentiment hit American shores. While it’s unclear whether the country’s recent election-meddling shenanigans will make this defiantly anti-commercial comedy any more appealing to viewers (it seems a stretch), Iannucci certainly deserves credit for even attempting to tackle a movie whose very existence sounds like a joke: If only the end result were as funny as the idea that anyone would undertake a film about the turmoil surrounding the Soviet despot’s demise.

Though sporadically brilliant, this too-often uneven send-up of Russian politics attempts to maintain the rapid-fire, semi-improvisational style of Iannucci’s earlier work — most notably his revolutionary 2009 feature “In the Loop,” still the most delightfully madcap comedy of the last decade — while situating such madness within an elaborately costumed and production-designed period milieu. (As such, the handheld, vaguely mock-doc shagginess of “The Thick of It” won’t do, replaced by a more classical, but laughter-flaccidifying style.) Set in early 1953, during the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of Stalin’s final hours, this tonally audacious tightrope walk translates Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin’s grimly absurdist graphic novel into the realm of burlesque — as if someone had taken Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” and reimagined it as a loony Marx brothers movie.

Only Iannucci could have seen the free-wheeling comedic potential in Nury’s comicbook retelling, and perhaps only he can fully appreciate the result, which assembles a formidable cast of English-speaking actors (with wildly diverse personalities and accents) to play the senior members of the Communist Party, or Council of Minsters, scrambling to maintain order after the death of their fearless leader. Stalin’s tail-chasing inner circle includes, among others, “Transparent” star Jeffrey Tambor (in a girdle and ill-fitting wig) as interim honcho Georgy Malenkov, prosthetic-nosed Steve Buscemi as acting general secretary (and future premier) Nikita Khrushchev, former “Monty Python” trouper Michael Palin as foreign affairs minister Vyacheslav Molotov and great British stage actor Simon Russell Beale as security chief Lavrentiy Beria.

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They’re a patently ridiculous lot, bumbling around like so many headless chickens and characterized by an often-contradictory mix of self-preservation and power-grabbing ambition, well aware that the same gesture that could put any one of them in charge could just as easily lead to his own execution. Iannucci introduces these buffoons on the fly, via on-screen text labels, but unless you’re up to speed on mid-century Soviet politics, that’s hardly enough to make sense of who they are. In Stalin’s presence, they’re sycophants, but behind his back, each would gladly take his place.

Though their dialogue — laden with insults and rich in expletives — sounds awfully similar to the combative backroom banter Iannucci pioneered in his BBC Four satire “The Thick of It,” such cavalier name-calling (“You’re not even a person! You’re a testicle! You’re made mostly of hair!” rants Rupert Friend as Stalin’s loose-cannon son Vasily) seems out of place in an environment in which saying the wrong thing can get one shot, or else shipped off to the gulag.

For starters, the shouty, badger-the-underling dynamic that works so well with “Veep” and “In the Loop” (where it’s conceivable that prima-donna public officials might treat their lackeys like garbage) doesn’t really apply among the Council of Ministers — except, perhaps, when they call upon the city’s only remaining doctors after Stalin collapses and berate the miserable lot of them for their inconclusive diagnoses (when all the competent M.D.s have long since been detained: “Any doctor still in Moscow is not a good doctor”).

Among themselves, however, their tempers seem totally out of sync with the world being depicted, as if Iannucci has tried to transpose a certain sniveling aspect of the British national character onto Soviet Russia (a ploy that already showed some strain when he attempted the same with the U.S. in “Veep”). There’s a certain class dynamic — discernible in breeding, education and manner of speech — that’s grounds for abuse in England, whereas the very premise of Communism (however corrupt) aspires toward equality.

Here, the movie’s odd stew of accents (some American, others British, with Jason Isaacs performing his bearish general — a fresh spin on James Gandolfini’s “Loop” bully — in a thick Yorkville accent) makes for an inconsistent mix, devolving into the sort of general pandemonium found at the end of “Casino Royale” and various Mel Brooks movies, when you half-expect the cinema to catch fire. The ensemble’s acting styles are nearly as diverse, ranging from Tambor’s pigeon-like disorientation (his Malenkov is a beta personality thrust into an alpha role) to the shrewd, multi-layered complexity of Andrea Riseborough’s turn as Stalin’s daughter, duly concerned for her own safety.

Still, “The Death of Stalin” is not without flashes of brilliance, from the opening scramble (Stalin calls Radio Moscow to compliment them on the evening’s concert, requesting a recording of the performance for himself, forcing the engineer to repeat the entire show) to the funeral itself, at which no one seems especially distraught at the nation’s loss, despite the elaborate pomp and circumstance required of them. But so much of the movie simply doesn’t work, from self-serving speeches drowned out by jets to the miscalculated hilarity of Beria’s ouster, hasty show-trial and subsequent execution.

As Nury and Robin’s graphic novel made clear, it’s far more effective to play such incidents straight than it is exaggerating them to this extent. It’s the difference between “Richard III” and “The Mouse That Roared,” where tragedy proves far more damning than farce.

Reviewed at Rodeo screening room, Los Angeles, Aug. 29, 2017. (In Toronto Film Festival — Platform.) Running time: 107 MIN.

Production: (France-U.K.-Belgium) An IFC Films release of a Quad, Main Journey production, in co-production with Gaumont, France 3 Cinema, La Compagnie Cinematographique, Panache Prods., AFPI, with the participation of Canal Plus, Cine Plus, France Televisions. Producers: Yann Zenou, Laurent Zeitoun, Nicolas Duval Adassovsky, Kevin Loader. Executive producer: Jean-Christophe Colson. Co-producers: Andre Logie, Gaetan David.
Crew: Director: Armando Iannucci. Screenplay: Fabien Nury, Armando Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin, based on the comic books by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. Camera (color): Zac Nicholson. Editor: Peter Lambert. Music: Christopher Willis.
With: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend, Jason Isaacs, Olga Kurylenko, Michael Palin, Andrea Riseborough, Paul Chahidi, Dermot Crowley, Adrian McLoughlin, Paul Whitehouse, Jeffrey Tambor. (English dialogue)

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The Death Of Stalin Review

20 Oct 2017

107 minutes

The Death Of Stalin

Cabinet reshuffles. Campaign funding. Congressional hearings on governmental efficiencies. These are not subjects which naturally lend themselves to mirth, yet Armando Iannucci has long proven himself capable ofwringing laughs out of the stodgiest, most solemntopics imaginable. The Death Of Stalin , however, is his most impressive feat yet. After taking on Whitehall and Washington with TV shows The Thick Of It and Veep , the master satirist’s new film tackles not only a slice of real-life Russian history, but a ruthless dictatorwhose government was responsible for famine, labour camps and mass executions. Incredibly, the results are absolutely hilarious.

Armando Iannucci's most impressive feat yet.

Moscow in 1953 was not a happy place to be. Under the beady eye of the totalitarian regime, with bugs and secret police everywhere, the mood was one of rampant paranoia. The neighbour someone confided in might be an informant; in a flash, a guard could become a prisoner himself. All of which made it a nightmare to live through, but very fruitful terrain for some incredibly dark comedy. In Veep , the main players were trying to get ahead of each other in order to boost their reputations and win extra perks. The Death Of Stalin ’s protagonists, on the other hand, are mostly just trying to stay alive. Even the most seemingly menial exchanges are fuelled by raw panic, spreading like a virus. In an early, scene-setting sequence, a concert-hall attendant played by Paddy Considine is commanded to provide Stalin with a concert recording that doesn’t exist. “Nobody’s going to be killed,” he frantically intones, looking profoundly uncertain that that’s the case. “This is just a musical emergency!”

Only the wiliest political operators are able to advance themselves in a climate this oppressive. And even by Iannucci’s standards, these power-hungry schemers are a vile and venal bunch. Jeffrey Tambor’s Malenkov is a preening, image-obsessed buffoon. Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev is a verbose, nakedly ambitious weasel. Simon Russell Beale’s Beria is the worst of the lot, a slimy monster who’s raped and murdered countless Russians. The Fast Show ’s Paul Whitehouse pops up as a bolshy Bolshevik. And this snakes' nest even has an actual Python, in the form of Michael Palin (Molotov), who brings a dash of Life Of Brian -esque silliness to a tremendously funny speech he delivers at a committee meeting. It’s a huge treat to see this unlikely ensemble interact, and one unhampered in the least by the fact there’s not a Russian accent to be heard — Jason Isaacs’ booming Yorkshire brogue as the macho war hero Zhukov is particularly, gloriously incongruous.

The comedy stems from the fact that, in this place and time, every word matters: dropping the wrong name, or laughing at the wrong joke, could result in your swift downfall. Iannucci and co-writers David Schneider and Ian Martin follow the broad plot strokes of the graphic novel the film is based on, but ramp up the sycophancy, cronyism and doublespeak, drawing out the inherent ludicrousness of each scenario. As the members of the Presidium vie to outscheme each other following Stalin’s demise, there’s an exhilarating precision to the dialogue, and fans of weapons-grade insults won’t be disappointed either. “I fucked Germany,” brags Zhukov at one point. “I think I can take a flesh lump in a fucking waistcoat.”

It’s full of absurdity, the kind of situations that only occur when too few people have too much power. But where The Death Of Stalin really hits home is in the moments when it drops the comedy and reveals what’s really at stake. A few scenes with Beria demonstrate, hauntingly, the depths of evil to which some will stoop when there are no checks or balances. And the film’s final ten minutes, as the laughs dry up and it lays out its bleak endgame, is a proper gutpuncher. For all its entertainingly abhorrent characters, it’s a deeply moral piece of work. Just one that has a corpse-moving scene straight out of a Blackpool panto.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, 60 minutes on: the death of stalin.

" The Death of Stalin " is the best thing that Armando Iannucci has ever done: a hilarious film about a subject that's not funny at all. The script, cowritten by Iannucci with David Schneider , Ian Martin and Peter Fellows , doesn't so much joke about dictatorship as find the very existence of authoritarianism to be one of humanity's sickest, saddest, oldest jokes—a fine distinction, but an important one, because it prevents the film from feeling exploitative, instead lending it the feeling of a lament in which the storyteller laughs so that he won't cry.

Set immediately before and after the death of Soviet premier Josef Stalin ( Adrian McLoughlin ), the story begins in Moscow in 1953, with our glorious-but-soon-to-be-not-breathing leader signing off on executions, forcing his staff to watch John Wayne-John Ford movies with him, and calling up a radio station during a live, unrecorded performance of a symphony and demanding a recording. (The latter necessitates a spontaneous second performance, recorded this time; it's led by a conductor who was rousted from his sleep and is still wearing his bedtime clothes.) The Kremlin is depicted here as a cult of personality, largely indifferent to the ideals the nation was theoretically founded on, and held together by arbitrary decrees, lots of guns, and a vast network of citizens who fear death, torture and imprisonment enough to rat out their neighbors whenever men in uniforms come calling. The cunning deployment of terror and violence makes powerful men out of mediocrities. The minute Stalin's body is discovered on the floor of his office—"lying in a puddle of indignity," as an underling puts it; down but not yet entirely out—a power vacuum opens up, and everyone above a certain rank anoints themselves Stalin's true heir and starts plotting to replace him.

As director, Iannucci plays ringmaster to a multinational cast of great character actors. He knows enough to modulate them for consistency's sake while letting them bring their own odd brilliance to whatever part they happen to fill. Steve Buscemi plays Stalin's eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev, as, basically, a smart Steve Buscemi character. He's a laid-back tactician with better people skills than his rivals can recognize—somebody who understands weakness and error well enough to capitalize on them more swiftly and effectively than most. His main rival is Simon Russell Beale's Laventri Beria, Stalin's longest-lived secret police chief: the architect of the gulags, and a man who prides himself on personally torturing and murdering prisoners under his watch. This monster's serene satisfaction would be unbearable if Iannucci didn't treat him, Khrushchev and the rest as blatant ass-kissers, so transparent in their aims that they'll literally race each other, on foot or in cars, to be the first to enter the orbit of those whose favor they seek.

Around these two strong if ridiculous leads, we have a flock of secondary characters with great faces, delivering one knockout line after another. Rupert Friend is Stalin's idiot son, Vasily, who keeps barging into sensitive meetings and public gatherings shouting nonsense and profanity. Andrea Riseborough is Stalin's daughter Svetlana, who recognizes the naked acquisitiveness of her father's men but is mostly powerless to stop it. Michael Palin (welcome back!) is Vyacheslav Molotov, a former Stalin protege and the longtime minister of foreign affairs—a man who seems politically impotent but has some tricks up his sleeve. Jason Isaacs is Georgy Zhukov, a World War II hero and general who had fallen somewhat out of favor at the time of Stalin's death, but entered the power struggle in a big way thanks to his understanding of Stalin as well as his own ruthlessness. He seems to be pulled into rooms by the momentum of his chin and chest. "I fucked Germany," he says, sizing up his chances against Beria. "I think I can take a flesh lump in a fucking waistcoat."

Jeffrey Tambor is Georgy Malenkov, the immediate successor to Stalin who was soon replaced by Khrushschev; he's an intelligent but overly cautious man who lacks the brute instincts necessary to succeed his master. You can tell that he doesn't have the right stuff when he's getting his portrait taken, realizes he needs privacy for a conversation, and leaves the room himself rather than order everyone else out, as Stalin would have done. "Did Coco Chanel take a shit on your head?" Zhukov asks him, eyeballing his toupee. "No," Malenov replies, "he did not." A stealth candidate for breakout star (unexpectedly so, given the overwhelming maleness of this cast) is Olga Kurylenko's Maria Yudina, the pianist introduced in the opening concert sequence; a Jewish woman mourning relatives killed under Stalin, she contrives to insert a scathing, handwritten note of protest into the record sleeve. Like Chekhov's fabled gun, this proves to be significant later.

Contrary to movie tradition, the actors avoid generic "Russian" accents (only Kurylenko, a Ukranian, sounds like a stereotypical Hollywood Russian). They all act in their native voices, and deliver their lines not with the momentousness we've been conditioned to expect from Oscar-baiting period pieces, but with something more akin to the half-bored grousing, whining and muttering that we all practice in our own lives, often while suffering through meetings that no participant, our glorious leaders included, have any desire to attend. The consequences of Stalin's high-handed but lowbrow leadership style become painfully clear once he's found motionless in his office. His underlings know they're required to take heroic measures to save him, but they have trouble locating even a mediocre doctor because their leader ordered most of them killed or sent to Siberia.

Anyone following the news coming out of the White House in 2018 couldn't help but see the tiny-minded bully Donald Trump and his leaking, backbiting, constantly-fired-or-resigning staff reflected in this film, even though the "The Death of Stalin" was based on a graphic novel by Fabien Nurya and conceived long before the 2016 presidential election. Nearly every civilization has suffered through some version of this madness. Iannucci's just here to skewer it, not in a lofty or smug way, but an earthy and immediate one, as if to remind us that yes, indeed, it can happen here, wherever "here" is. The end product joins an elite series of similarly blackhearted comedies about the reptilian impulses that drive men in power: " Dr. Strangelove ," " Apocalypse Now ,” “ Catch-22 ," " M*A*S*H " and (lower mammal division) "Animal Farm."

Iannucci is a specialist in political satire who's been here, in one way or another, many times before, in "The Thick of It," "In the Loop," and "Veep"; but this movie is so much more ambitious, sophisticated and confident that it makes his earlier work feel like a warmup, because every choice by a politician or general is shown having immediate, often horrible physical consequences for some poor, unsuspecting schmuck, and because Iannucci has upped his game this time out, directing in a purposeful, at times expressive way rather than just using the camera to record actors talking to each other. My favorite flourish is the introductions: each new major character, invariably a small-minded and vicious person, is unveiled with a title card in a Scorsese-like, slow motion close-up, while performing some ordinary gesture or task. It's the filmmaking equivalent of a toady lavishing praise on a social superior even though he's done nothing of note.

The greed, desperation and narcissism driving every decision in this tale, however momentous or trivial, rings true to life even if you've never, say, tortured a political prisoner, or ordered the execution of someone you suspected of plotting against you. The treachery is usually couched in terms of ideology or selfless public service, but of course it's all a power grab of some kind, and the longer the movie goes on, the more coldly hilarious Iannucci's stylish deadpan becomes, until, by the end, things take a turn for the gruesomely surreal, and we feel as if we're watching the cheekiest horror film never made. That the major events depicted here actually happened makes "Death of Stalin" even more unsettling. Yes, people were this ruthless and trivial. Yes, millions died for one man's ego and pleasure, and after he keeled over and wet himself, his inner circle scrambled to occupy his chair. This is what dictatorship looks like.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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clock This article was published more than 6 years ago

‘The Death of Stalin’ deploys the satirical stings of ‘Veep,’ even more pointedly

Rating: 3 stars

The style of humor in satirist Armando Iannucci’s latest film, “The Death of Stalin,” is a frightfully uneasy one. Sight gags and slapstick erupt from a pervasive atmosphere of dread and terror. In one early scene, an orchestra conductor is so overcome with worry that a wiretap may have caught him disparaging the titular dictator’s musical discernment that he faints, thwacking his head on a metal bucket. Just moments before, Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) had phoned in a request for a recording of the performance. But because it’s for live radio, it hasn’t been taped, causing the producer (Paddy Considine) to sheepishly hold the studio audience hostage for a repeat performance. They applaud wildly — knowing that their very existence is at the pleasure of an unpredictable madman.

A replacement conductor — still in his bathrobe — is dragged in from his home, where he assumes that the knock on his door is the secret police coming to haul him off to prison (or worse). As he leaves his building, many of his neighbors are also being violently carted away. Even the highest-ranking members of the government are scared that they will inadvertently do something to get themselves killed: Communist Party secretary Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) has his wife write down everything he says — along with the dictator’s reaction — studying the ever-evolving list to refine his behavior. Central Committee member Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) is such a loyalist that when Stalin’s goons imprison his wife, he assumes she deserved it. (This sets up a painfully funny moment, later in the film, when the two are reunited after Stalin’s death, which occurs early on, precipitating the power struggle that is the basis of the plot.)

As Stalin’s deputy, Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) should be next in line, but Stalin’s brutal enforcer Laventri Beria (Simon Russell Beale) has already begun his savage plotting for power. Beale, who’s known as a great Shakespearean stage actor, plays Beria like Iago, jumping from one betrayal to another. In a more traditionally constructed comedy, he’d play the straight man, acting as a foil to the comic antics of Buscemi, Palin and Tambor. But while Iannucci whips up a fever-pitch frenzy, his film, based on a 2017 graphic novel, is not a farce, but a tragicomedy. The dark elements are too corrosive to be tempered by laughter.

When Stalin’s deranged son pulls out a gun in a crowd of mourners surrounding his father’s coffin, there’s a palpable fear that he might actually kill someone. This dampens the humor in a series of one-liners (penned by Iannucci, with co-screenwriters David Schneider and Ian Martin). Throughout the film, comic moments are derailed by jarringly violent outbursts (or the threat of them).

Remembering the uproarious laughter of Iannucci’s “ In the Loop ” (2009) and the TV series “ Veep ” can create a longing for more humor than Iannucci is willing to dole out here. But the filmmaker doesn’t seem to mind if he steps on the joke. He has a serious point to make about the dangers of surrendering truth in the face of power.

When power is based on whim and blind loyalty, that creates an untenable atmosphere, the film argues, placing ideology on shaky moral footing. One minute, Beria is gleefully passing out death lists, with sadistic instructions, and the next minute he’s retracting them as the political landscape shifts.

It’s not surprising that the film was banned in Russia, where Vladimir Putin appears to be following in the footsteps of the dictator who is being lampooned here , suppressing speech and allegedly eliminating his critics. But Iannucci has other Western targets in his sights as well. By implication, “The Death of Stalin” is about all power-hungry leaders with shifting ideology and demands of absolute loyalty.

Anyone else sound familiar?

R. At Landmark’s E Street and Bethesda Row cinemas. Contains crude language throughout, violence and some sexual references. 97 minutes.

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The Death of Stalin review: This witty, dark story is held back by an outsider vision

It makes us think that maybe the stalin terror and its aftermath isn’t such a good subject for comedy after all, article bookmarked.

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Jason Isaacs appearing in a cameo as military hero Marshal Zhukov

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British artists, writers and satirists have long been fascinated by Russian culture. Chekhov plays are continually staged in British theatres and Tolstoy novels are adapted for screen and TV at regular intervals.

In recent years, Peter Greenaway has made a biopic about Soviet-era filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein while Julian Barnes has written a novel ( The Noise Of Time ) about composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s terror of being arrested after Stalin denounced his “fidgety, neurotic” opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk .

Martin Amis has also written fiction and non-fiction dealing with Stalin’s terror. Armando Iannucci’s new feature The Death Of Stalin thus follows in a very long tradition of interpreting Russian history through British eyes.

Armando Iannucci comedy The Death of Stalin facing ban in Russia

The film is funny and shocking by turns but this is still an outsider’s vision. Iannucci portrays the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1953 much as if it is a slightly more violent version of a leftist militant British city council in the 1980s.

Josef Stalin (engagingly played by Adrian Mcloughlin) is a very cunning and down-to-earth tyrant. There have been so many purges and executions under his rule that even his closest followers can’t quite remember “who’s alive and who’s dead”.

They all know that they might be promoted one day and then denounced the next, arrested and either shot or hauled off to the gulags. Life, they accept, is very cheap.

Iannucci begins the film with a wonderfully comic, surrealistic and chilling set piece. Radio Moscow is staging a performance of a Mozart piano concerto in front of a live audience. The producer Comrade Andreyev (Paddy Considine) receives a call from Stalin himself.

The great dictator has enjoyed the performance so much that he would like a recording to be sent to him forthwith. His request induces panic and terror. The station hasn’t recorded the concert and so Andreyev forces the orchestra to play it all over again, even if that means locking in the audience, bribing the pianist Maria Yudina (Olga Kurylenko), a haughty and beautiful figure who detests Stalin, and finding a new conductor, who oversees the second performance in his dressing gown.

The filmmakers capture the comedy as well as the paranoia that comes with everyday life under the dictator. There is real grotesquerie too in the early scene of Stalin and his closest comrades, eating, drinking and chest-bumping together, behaving like the senior pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm .

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Iannucci goes out of his way to reveal the banality of Stalin’s existence. The dictator may have been responsible for the death of millions but his own demise is very undignified indeed. He is eventually discovered in his own piss (“lying in a puddle of indignity” as it is put.)

No doctor can be found because most of the competent ones have been purged. Even before his death has been established, the jockeying to succeed him begins in earnest. The only ones who seem to care for him are his daughter, Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough), and his hot-tempered son, Vasily (Rupert Friend).

The filmmakers have assembled a formidable cast. The actors speak in a range of vernacular accents. Steve Buscemi plays the reforming Nikita Khrushchev in a way that can’t help but rekindle memories of his prohibition era gangster/politician “Nucky” Thompson in Boardwalk Empire .

He’s a decent man, disgusted by Stalin’s excesses, but capable of extreme ruthlessness. Other characters include Michael Palin, in antic, Pythonesque form as Molotov, a party loyalist who’ll denounce anyone, even his own beloved wife, and Jeffrey Tambor, who bears a resemblance to Boris Karloff as the ineffectual and increasingly forlorn Malenkov, seemingly destined to take over from Stalin.

Late on, we get a very rum cameo from Jason Isaacs, who plays military hero Marshal Zhukov as if he is a bluntly spoken Yorkshireman in the Brian Close or Geoffrey Boycott mould and who tells all and sundry to “fook” off.

One of the delights of the film is Simon Russell Beale’s creepy but comic turn as Beria, head of the NKVD, the secret police, and by a distance, the most lethal member of Stalin’s entourage. Russell Beale plays Beria in a weasel-like, calculating and passive-aggressive fashion that echoes his performance as the similarly unctuous Widmerpool in the TV version of Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time . He is like a senior British civil servant. The difference, of course, is that most British civil servants don’t torture people or make them disappear.

The accents and tweed jackets accentuate the feeling that we’re in Britain, not Soviet-era Russia. The dialogue is very ripe and full of colourful expletives. “Did Coco Chanel take a shit in your head?” one character goads another about his aftershave.

Why in the name of “God’s arse” did he invite the bishops, another character asks when representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church turn up at Stalin’s funeral.

Parts of The Death Of Stalin have the same barbed, outspoken humour found in Iannucci’s politically-themed TV satires like The Thick Of It and Veep . The jokes, though, begin to seem increasingly incongruous as we realise how many people have actually died and are continuing to die.

The members of the Central Committee are all completely aware that if any of them makes a false step, the results will be lethal. When they do finally turn on one of their own, Iannucci films the scene in a way that evokes memories of the makeshift trial and execution of Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.

We see a character who seems to have been in charge a few moments before being arrested, humiliated and killed. Given his misdeeds, this character may not deserve much sympathy but the manner of his death is still shocking.

It makes us think that maybe the Stalin terror and its aftermath isn’t such a good subject for comedy after all. Iannucci’s version of events may be well researched but it still gives us a very British, very witty but facetious version of a dark story which might have been better told by an insider.

The Death of Stalin hits UK cinemas 20 October

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The Death of Stalin

Review by brian eggert march 27, 2018.

The Death of Stalin opens with a sequence that perfectly articulates its exploration of how fear leads to the absurd. In the Stalinist Soviet Union of 1953, during a concerto broadcast over Moscow radio, pianist Maria Yudina (Olga Kurylenko) plays a selection from Mozart. At the same time, a radio programmer (Paddy Considine) receives a call from Joseph Stalin himself, played Adrian McLoughlin. With strict orders to call Stalin back in precisely 17 minutes, the programmer scrambles to determine whether the countdown started 30 seconds or a minute ago, fearing that if he should return the call late, he will be another name on the totalitarian ruler’s dreaded kill lists. When he eventually calls back, the programmer gets instructions to have a recording of the performance ready for pickup, which is a simple request, except the concert wasn’t recorded. Thinking fast, the programmer convinces the orchestra and pianist to play again for Stalin’s recording, this time with louder applause from an audience he wrangles off the street. Compelled by a desperate fear, he completes the recording, which is delivered to Stalin, who never hears it. Yudina included a harsh note along with the recording, and upon reading it, Stalin collapses.

Merciless and riotously funny, The Death of Stalin transforms the authoritarian regime into a site for macabre humor, often twisting one of history’s most genocidal eras into the punchlines of a scathing comedy. Armando Iannucci’s film blends actual history with an equal dose of fictionalized satire, condensing and reordering history to turn the most outlandish factual accounts into broad-spectrum humor composed of acidic British wit, slapstick, and political parody. Getting his start in British television, the Glasgow-born Iannucci is best known for the BBC’s The Thick of It (2005-2012), its cinematization In the Loop (2009), and HBO’s Veep (2012-still going strong), though not in that order. He also co-created Alan Partridge alongside Steve Coogan, making him something of a treasure to all of humanity. With The Death of Stalin , Iannucci finds eerie relevance in the material, namely in the inherent danger and horror that occurs from blindly towing the party line amid political chaos.

Based on graphic novels by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, the film shows Chairman Stalin basking in the adulation of his Council of Ministers until, at last, he topples over from a cerebral hemorrhage in his country dacha, facing certain death. Even with their leader unlikely to wake, his counsel remains fearful of saying anything that he might hear, just in case he regains consciousness and seeks reprisals. Stalin’s inner circle consists of Deputy Chairman Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), an assured dope and next in line to the throne; Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi, outstanding), a chair on the council and most sensible hyena in the pack; the ousted Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin); and the repugnant Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), head of the NKVD secret police and administrator of the Gulag. Stalin’s seniormost acolytes vie for primacy over the regime in anticipation of his death, while also fumbling amid the remnants of their leader’s bureaucracy. Of course, these men have carried out Stalinism’s worst crimes, including a daily routine of mass killings and arrests. Rooting for any of them becomes a thorny prospect. Nonetheless, Beria, a serial rapist—who kisses Stalin’s hand one moment, cheers the instant he thinks Stalin has died and then cowers again when it turns out he’s still breathing—presents a compelling villain of the bunch.

Elsewhere, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough) arrives and incites a competition between Beria and Khrushchev, each trying to gain the favor of their leader’s beloved offspring. They’re less interested in her brother Vasily (Rupert Friend), a reckless and trigger-happy drunk. When Stalin eventually dies, Malenkov assumes his position and, in doing so, becomes a puppet—with Beria pulling the strings on his girdle. It’s appropriate, then, that Tambor’s makeup gets thicker and his lips darker, as Malenkov prepares himself for photo opportunities by donning the look of a silent film star. Khrushchev and Beria quickly try to align Malenkov with their own interests, knowing the weak replacement cannot last. The Council assigns Khrushchev the unhappy task of arranging a funeral for Stalin, while Beria continues to make impulsive, or perhaps devilishly calculated political moves, knowing that amid the ensuing chaos, he can seize power for himself. Meanwhile, the members of Stalin’s Council on the outer orbit—Lazar Kaganovich (Dermot Crowley), Anastas Mikoyan (Paul Whitehouse), and Nikolai Bulganin (Paul Chahidi)—flow with the tide, their loyalties determined by whoever resides in power.

Iannucci’s inspired casting places certain actors into familiar roles. He borrows from HBO’s ranks to cast Buscemi as Khrushchev, who recalls the actor’s Nucky Thompson from Boardwalk Empire . Tambor plays Malenkov as dimwitted and egomaniacal, bringing to mind his thick-headed sidekick Hank Kingsley from The Larry Sanders Show . Palin has an opportunity for Brazil -esque speech as Molotov, as his character explains his loyalties in twisted logic to an increasingly frustrated Council: “I have always been loyal to Stalin. Always. And these arrests were authorized by Stalin. But Stalin was always loyal to the collective leadership. That is true loyalty. But he had an iron principle, undeviating, strong. Shouldn’t we do the same, and stick to what we believed in? No. It’s stronger still to forge one’s own beliefs into the beliefs of collective leadership… Which I have now done.” The wordsmithing of such a speech is equally funny and impressive.

To be sure, The Death of Stalin occupies a distinctly British humor (as opposed to a Russian sensibility), combining wit and absurdity in deadpan notes, yet through a Brechtian delivery system that never allows the viewer to forget they’re watching satire. The screenplay by Iannucci, Nury, David Schneider, Ian Martin, and Peter Fellows feels whole, or at least as much as something rooted in political disorder chaos can attain cohesiveness. Scenes alternate between Iannucci’s biting humor and brutally funny insults (“You’re not a person, you’re a testicle!”), and the grim realities of Stalin’s USSR. There are brief glimpses inside the Gulag with emaciated prisoners and point-blank executions; citizens shot down in the streets by the NKVD; and perhaps least funny of all, during Beria’s eventual execution, the details of his sex crimes read aloud, his victims listed in the hundreds, at ages as low as 7-years-old—a detail followed by Beria’s corpse burning in a gruesome image. The brilliance of Iannucci’s limber tonal shifts is that he can switch between them in an instant, keeping a sharp audience on edge, while never losing our investment in the film.

The Death of Stalin was written and shot before Trump took office, though it cannot help but reflect our current cult of personality surrounding the celebrity-turned-President, a figure allegedly controlled by Russian interests. Certainly, it’s enough if the film occupied nothing more than a historical satire, lampooning the anxieties and ridiculous behavior that actually occurred around Stalin’s deathbed and funeral with an appropriate amount of artistic license. But perhaps it also reveals how life around an authoritarian leader, inevitably, gives way to moral gray areas out of sheer self-preservation, linking Stalin’s distinctly hypermasculine court to that of Trump. In his depiction of power’s absurdity, Iannucci may have (unintentionally, and yet unapologetically) revealed what the reported chaos in the White House must be like, with self-interested parties carrying out ludicrous requests that, at the moment, seem justified. For today’s audiences, the film demonstrates how towing the party line with blind complicity leads to a gross distortion of ideology until the only ideology is obedience.

Although The Death of Stalin initially secured a license for exhibition in Russia, officials in their Culture Ministry balked at the film’s humor toward their history and banned the film, not only in Russia but in several other countries that were part of the former Soviet Union. Among other things, the Culture Ministry took aim at the film’s portrayal of Zhukov, given his heroic place in Russian culture for winning the Battle of Stalingrad against the Nazis—a victory that has emboldened the current streak of nationalism that seems to validate similar Stalinist crimes in Russia today. Laughter might be the only way to process contemporary political hysterics around the globe, and Iannucci delivers a wry sense of historical irony. The Death of Stalin ‘s comically circular structure brings us back to the opening scene’s concert hall in the last shot, with Khrushchev having seized power and Leonid Brezhnev behind him, waiting for his moment. If nothing else, the film reassures, through laughter and historical relativity, that every power-mad leader soon meets their end.

(Editor’s Note: Review updated to reflect Jason Isaacs’ South Yorkshire, not Cockney, accent. )

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The Death of Stalin review – more bleak than black

K nown and loved for lacerating political satires The Thick of It , In the Loop and Veep , Armando Iannucci has a gift for skewering incompetent authority figures – locating the humour in their bumbling errors – as well as for truly creative, foul-mouthed insults. Iannucci and Soviet Russia: on paper, it’s a match made in heaven – both an opportunity to capitalise on anti-Russia sentiment and a chance to jab one of history’s most notorious autocrats in the ribs at a time when dictatorial, power-drunk figures are actually in power. A shame, then, that it doesn’t jab hard enough.

The film is adapted from Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin’s graphic novel , in which Stalin’s sudden death in 1953 serves as a catalyst for action, with neurotic acting general secretary Nikita “Nicky” Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and comrades Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor, deliciously vain and making fine use of a girdle) and foreign affairs minister Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) each trying to manoeuvre his way into a position of more power. Depending on your existing knowledge of the Soviet Union, it can be a little hard to keep up (“I can’t remember who’s alive and who’s dead!” one character jokes), though the film is transparently more interested in the broad comedy of morbid sight gags and set pieces than it is in cross-examining the particularities of the period’s politics.

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.

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‘The Death of Stalin’ Review: Political Satire on Dictators, Corruption Draws Blood

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Who’d have thought the demise of a kill-happy Russian dictator could leave you laughing helplessly? That’s The Death of Stalin for you, a slapstick tragedy – and for the funniest, fiercest comedy of the year so far – from the fertile mind of Armando Iannucci , the British political satirist behind the HBO’s Veep and the sensational, Strangelovian In the Loop (2009). First, imagine a government run by lunatics (In the age of Trump and Kim Jong-un, that’s not so hard.) Then rewind to the Moscow of 1953, when Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) holds his cabinet hostage to his every whim, including the forced watching of John Wayne Westerns. That is, when he’s not preparing the next day’s murder list – a lethal version of Twitter.

Then the old man dies, in a puddle of his own piss, from a stroke brought on by a screw-you note from a pianist comrade (Olga Kurylenko) whose family he’s executed. Cue various party leaders and sycophants plotting to take his place. Not since The Marx Brothers and Monty Python have clowns aspired so uproariously to rise about their station. No one makes an attempt to speak or even sound Russian – all the better for American and British actors to fire off one-liners like a string of joke bullets. They’re totally hilarious.

Adapted by Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin from the French graphic novel series by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, The Death of Stalin flies on the fumes of its own wild, wacky invention. Casting Steve Buscemi , all mirth and malice, as Nikita Khrushchev (!) is just one instance of how Iannucci turns WTF outrageousness into comedy gold. There’s also Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov, the conceited buffoon who is the dictator’s deputy; the great Simon Russell Beale as chief of Soviet security and known rapist/murderer Lavrentiy Beria; Python’s own Michael Palin as Vyacheslav Molotov, whose wife was imprisoned for treason with his permission; and the sidesplitting Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov, the leader of Russia’s military.

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Then there’s Stalin’s family to consider. Andrea Riseborough brings a fearful intensity to Svetlana, the daughter who feels more vulnerable the more Khrushchev, the next premier, assures her of her safety. And Rupert Friend is volcanically funny as the tantrum-throwing Vasily, the son who doesn’t fall far from dad’s poison tree.

These characters, not as far from reality as you’d assume, would all be easy to mock if they weren’t so dangerous. There’s an unease at the core of Iannucci’s political comedy that gives it bite and purpose. He’s a comic thinker who views politics, past, present and scary future, as a drive for power with little thought for the people being governed. Timely much? The comic darts he throws draw blood. Laugh all you want at this confederacy of political dunces, but you can’t laugh them off. The Death of Stalin holds up a dark comic mirror to a world that’s not hard to recognize as our own.

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The death of stalin, common sense media reviewers.

Language, violence in amazing, absurd historical comedy.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

There's no moral here; everyone is after power at

The main characters are political schemers and oft

Frequent violence that's core to telling this stor

Sex acts are discussed in the context of frequent

Frequent strong language, including "f--k" and var

One character is a lush; his drinking is portrayed

Positive Messages

There's no moral here; everyone is after power at any cost. People are sometimes depicted at their ugliest, and even when characters get their comeuppance, it's not exactly for what you might call "the right reasons." Certainly not everyone who's guilty of the horrors of the time pays a price.

Positive Role Models

The main characters are political schemers and often actual mass murderers from history who are jockeying for power. Perhaps the closest to a hero/heroine would be a minor character who lost her family to Stalin's purges and is flatly willing to die for the honor of spitting in his face. But she's a ripple in an ocean of killers, backstabbers, and opportunists -- all fascinating, but hardly role models.

Violence & Scariness

Frequent violence that's core to telling this story about the time of the Soviet Great Terror, when the wrong word in the wrong ear could get a person (and their family) killed. Many executions shown, marching citizens are fired upon, torture is shown lightly, and rape is strongly implied -- including of young girls/children (not shown, but set up offscreen and described). The violence isn't glamorized or played for laughs, and only in a few cases is it graphic. But its specter is a constant presence in the film.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Sex acts are discussed in the context of frequent coercion by those in power. Healthy sexuality is not present.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent strong language, including "f--k" and variants, plus "s--t," "c--k," "c--t," "ass," and crude descriptions of sex acts.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

One character is a lush; his drinking is portrayed comically and negatively.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Death of Stalin is a dark, absurdist comedy based on the graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. It has lots of strong language (including "f--k," "s--t," etc.) and quite a bit of violence related to the time of the Soviet Great Terror. While the violence is rarely graphic, it does include a man being shot point-blank in the head and the aftermath of that execution. Its mass-murderer characters are also guilty of or complicit in rape and torture, though those acts aren't shown on-screen. But really, it's the movie's pervasive tension -- the stress of living in that time -- that's most likely to disturb younger viewers. Steve Buscemi , Jeffrey Tambor , and Michael Palin co-star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (5)
Kids say (15)

Based on 5 parent reviews

A lot of barking and a bit of bite

What's the story.

In THE DEATH OF STALIN, it's 1953 in Moscow: the era of state-mandated paranoia and violence now called the Great Terror by historians. When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke, his lieutenants scramble to take power and eliminate rivals. Among those on the rollercoaster of scheming: Minister for Agriculture Nikita Khruschev ( Steve Buscemi ), designated successor Georgy Malenkov ( Jeffrey Tambor ), Stalin loyalist Vyacheslav Molotov ( Michael Palin ), and feared Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale), head of the secret police. In a blitz of shifting loyalties and machinations -- not to mention the arrival of Stalin's children ( Andrea Riseborough , Rupert Friend ) and the formidable leader of the army ( Jason Isaacs ) -- the winners and losers will be determined behind the scenes as the Soviet people gather to pay their last respects.

Is It Any Good?

This is a frequently amazing, head-spinning, tragic farce that somehow manages to balance violent, stressful paranoia with absurd comedy. The laughs never come cheaply; the film stays firmly planted in that terrifying era in which the wrong word in the wrong ear could lead to an entire family's disappearance. That this atmosphere of terror isn't given short shrift drastically raises The Death of Stalin 's stakes above those of most political comedies. Some may know director/co-writer Armando Iannucci from HBO's Veep ; others may be familiar with his famed BBC series on British politics, The Thick of It , and its brilliant, Oscar-nominated spin-off film In the Loop . Iannucci found fame by satirizing the petty squabbles and bad behavior that frequently end up shaping public policy. Now imagine all that vicious backroom maneuvering and all of those personality clashes, with the given circumstance that death and erasure are likely consequences for failure. It's as if Veep met 1984 met Game of Thrones . And somehow, amid the horrors of lives destroyed and human beings exploited, The Death of Stalin evokes snickers of recognition and produces laugh-out-loud moments. It's quite a feat. Making the balancing act even more impressive, the writers (adapting the graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin) frequently achieve a kind of Chekhovian cadence in the dialogue, with its plain-spoken formality and attention to small details ("Who put a lamp on this chair?") and then mix it with the very modern, ripely profane, brutally cutting language for which Iannucci is famous. That the actors don't use Russian accents dispenses with another unnecessary layer of formality.

The cast, which has already earned many honors in England, is letter-perfect. As Khruschev, Buscemi has one of his best parts in years. Khruschev's learning curve is steep, a fascinating arc from start to finish. British stage star Beale has been picking up nominations and wins as brutal puppeteer Beria, and Tambor's arrogant waffling as Malenkov makes all the reversals possible. Riseborough and Friend get laughs and some sympathy as Stalin's grown children: She's kind of a Masha figure (from Chekhov's The Seagull ), while he's a boozy loose cannon who was born on third and thinks he hit a triple. Isaacs is a formidable presence as Field Marshal Zhukov; he's the hot knife that cuts through the congealed fat of bureaucrats who convene a committee to debate getting a doctor when they find Stalin felled. The Death of Stalin 's tragicomic chaos vaults over a bar that few films would dream of attempting to clear.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in The Death of Stalin . How does the fact that the film is a comedy affect the impact of the violent scenes?

Do movies need clear heroes? There's clearly someone to root against in The Death of Stalin , but were you actually rooting for anyone? Does that affect your enjoyment of the film? Can you think of a major Hollywood movie with a similar situation? Are independent films like this more able to get away with that? Why or why not?

Does it seem disrespectful, appropriate, or both to portray historical figures cursing and plotting (and, in one case, urinating on himself in a time of physical distress)? Does it make those people seem more alive and their story more immediate? Or did it distract you and make you take the events less seriously?

Did you know anything about this period of history before the film? Did it make you want to learn more? Did you notice any political agenda in the filmmaking, or was it not about politics as much as it was about people?

Do you think it's appropriate to make a comedy about the Great Terror and the death of Joseph Stalin and its aftermath? What's gained or lost by telling the story comedically?

Movie Details

In theaters : March 9, 2018
On DVD or streaming : June 19, 2018
Cast : Steve Buscemi , Jeffrey Tambor , Andrea Riseborough , Jason Isaacs , Simon Russell Beale , Michael Palin
Director : Armando Iannucci
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : IFC Films
Genre : Comedy
Run time : 106 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language throughout, violence and some sexual references
Last updated : June 11, 2023

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Death of Stalin, The (United Kingdom/France/Belgium, 2017)

The movie opens during the final days of the reign of Josef Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), who is presented as a stiff, humorless, monosyllabic figure who rubber-stamps the enemies lists concocted by the head of the NKVD (the KGB’s predecessor), Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale). After suffering a cerebral hemorrhage, Stalin lingers for several days while key policy-makers, including Nikita Khrushchev (Buscemi), Vyacheslav Molotov (Palin), Beria, and Stalin’s protégé, Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), bicker about the path forward. Eventually, a power struggle erupts between Khrushchev and Beria, with both trying outmaneuver the other in everything from allowing the trains to run on the day of Stalin’s funeral to wooing the favor of the former leader’s daughter, Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough). The meaning of the word “harm” acquires great significance.

In the United States, The Death of Stalin targets a niche audience. And, although it’s true that a little knowledge of history will enhance the film’s effectiveness (one laughs more fully at the jokes when the underlying truth is understood), there’s a universality to the humor that will reach even those with only a vague knowledge of who Stalin was. (The bad guy who used to rule Russia, right?) The Death of Stalin isn’t as brilliant and cutting as In the Loop (nor is it as profane) but it’s a recognition that historical politics can be just as bizarre and absurd as the modern flavor.

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THE DEATH OF STALIN

"funny anti-communist satire but too much foul language".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: Jealousy, betrayal, deceit, and scheming with a satirical tone.

More Detail:

THE DEATH OF STALIN is a hilarious satire about the jockeying for position among the leaders of the Soviet Union after the brutal tyrant Joe Stalin’s sudden death. THE DEATH OF STALIN is brilliantly directed, scored and acted, with a strong anti-communist message that shows absolute power corrupts absolutely, but it has way too much foul language, which prevents the movie from achieving true greatness.

The movie opens in Moscow at a concert hall where an orchestra is just finishing a Mozart concerto. Right before the finish, the concert hall director gets a call from Stalin himself to call him back in 17 minutes. After a funny bit of dialogue between the director and his assistant about when exactly did Stalin call (the assistant doesn’t remember, and the director wasn’t watching the clock), the director calls Stalin back. Stalin orders the director to record the concert, but the concert had just finished. The director frantically tries to stop the audience and orchestra from leaving.

Cut to Stalin at his country estate just outside Moscow, where he’s partying with his inner circle. Among those present is Beria, Stalin’s brutal head of the secret police, the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. Also present are Nikita Khrushchev, who leads the Communist Party in Moscow, and Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s apprentice and presumed successor, among a couple other high Soviet officials. At the makeshift dinner table, Khrushchev (played by Steve Buscemi) is bragging about an incident involving grenades and German POWs at the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II. It soon becomes clear that every man is extremely deferential and careful about their interactions with Stalin, who suddenly orders the men to come with him to watch a cowboy movie from America in his estate’s little movie theater. (It’s a historical fact that Stalin would watch American cowboy movies with his inner circle, but the movies had no subtitles.) During the meeting with his inner circle, Stalin gives Beria a new list of people to murder and arrest.

Back at the concert hall, the orchestra’s female pianist refuses to play the Mozart concerto again for the hall’s exasperated director. He has a private conversation backstage with her, where she reminds him that she loathes Stalin because he had her family murdered. The director offers her an extra 10,000 rubles to play the concerto again, and the pianist settles for 20,000. However, during the rush to begin playing Mozart again and record the concert, the conductor falls, and a fire extinguisher falls on his head, knocking him unconscious.

Cut to Beria’s secret police and military officers making arrests with sounds of gunshots off screen revealing that they’re also executing people on the spot. These scenes are followed by a scene where some officers knock on the door of an older married couple just about to go to bed. Frightened for his life, the husband says goodbye to his wife. However, it turns out that the police have just come to take the man back to the concert hall, so he can replace the unconscious orchestra conductor. At the same time, a group of weary and bewildered peasants enter the concert hall to take the place of the concert goers who had already left before the director could stop them from leaving.

The concert starts again with the peasants staring in bewilderment at the orchestra. One woman is concentrating on the knitting she was doing when she was rounded up.

With the concert finished, the director is ready to hand over the recording to an army lieutenant, but the female pianist wants to stuff a little personal note to Stalin into the record sleeve. The horrified director can only imagine what insults to Stalin that the pianist has written. They have a tussle over the record with the note inside, but the lieutenant stops them. He admonishes them that they’re late with delivering the concert recording and coldly warns them he’s putting that fact down in his report.

The recording is finally delivered to Stalin while he’s alone in his study. He starts the recording on his record player. As the music begins, he notices the pianist’s note, which has fallen to the floor. Sure enough, as he starts to read it aloud, it’s an angry diatribe against him. Stalin starts to laugh raucously, but suddenly he gets a pained look on his face and collapses to the floor. The two soldiers guarding the door to Stalin’s study hear the thud. However, they’re too afraid to open the door and interrupt their “fearless leader.”

The next morning, the breakfast maid finds Stalin’s body. Beria gets a call about Stalin’s collapse and starts to rush over to Stalin’s estate. Meanwhile, Khrushchev, who’s still in his pajamas, sees some commotion in the courtyard of the Kremlin where he and his wife live. So, he decides to skip breakfast and get quickly dressed.

The inner circle is soon gathered around Stalin’s body. Stalin still seems alive, but barely. They carry him to his bed, then have a crazy argument about whether they should call a doctor. One of the men says, however, that Stalin has killed or sent all the good doctors in Moscow to the Gulag. (Historical note: Months before his death, Stalin had conducted a purge of doctors in Moscow when some Jewish doctors were falsely accused of trying to assassinate him.) They send a female officer to lead a search for some doctors. Cut to an old doctor walking his dog in the town square. He sees the woman and a group of other soldiers exit a military vehicle, and he starts running, but they soon catch up with him.

As a group of doctors, including the old doctor, hover over Stalin’s body, Stalin wakes up and starts pointing. “He’s pointing to his successor!” one man shouts, but when it seems as if Stalin’s pointing at Khrushchev, they decide he’s pointing at a painting of a female peasant with a pitcher of milk. So, the men start making up all sorts of weird Russian, communist theories about what the painting means, and why Stalin is pointing at it.

Shortly thereafter, Stalin finally breathes his last. His inner circle starts arguing about what to do.

In the midst of this chaos, Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, and crazy son, Vasily, learn about their father’s sudden illness and death. The inner circle debates what to do about the crazy son, who begins shouting all kinds of conspiracy theories. They also try to outdo one another in comforting Svetlana, but she’s too upset. Meanwhile, Beria starts trying to control the whole situation. This starts to cause some resentment among the others. However, the inner circle seems to agree that Malenkov should take over as leader, but he shows himself to be indecisive, vain and weak. At one moment, he’s agreeing to one thing, then immediately agreeing to the exact opposite when someone says something slightly critical or even just looks like he’s about to say something critical.

Meanwhile, Khrushchev grows increasingly suspicious of Beria, who clearly wants to remain in control of the secret police and the army, while propping up Malenkov. When the pompous, slightly disgraced hero of World War II, General Zhukov, arrives for Stalin’s funeral, Khrushchev sees his chance. He starts plotting against Beria while trying to use the power he’s been given to organize Stalin’s funeral and run the trains running in and out of Moscow.

All the comical chaos eventually leads to a chilling conclusion as Khrushchev moves the major chess pieces to benefit himself and ensure a violent demise for Beria.

THE DEATH OF STALIN is a small but opulent production. It’s very funny as well as brilliantly directed, scored and acted. The talented Steve Buscemi plays the calculating Khrushchev as a comical, chubbier version of his gangster character in BOARDWALK EMPIRE. The other actors are funny as well, especially Jason Isaacs as General Zhukov, Michael Palin as Molotov, Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov, and Simon Russell Beale as Beria.

THE DEATH OF STALIN is a satire. So, it makes no pretense of being a totally accurate depiction of what happened and what was said during Stalin’s death and its aftermath. Thus, it isn’t true to life, and it telescopes or condenses some events. However, it seems to get the details mostly right about the various characters involved, including who Khrushchev collaborated with to get rid of Beria and turn Malenkov into a figurehead. The only false note perhaps is the movie’s depiction of Stalin’s son, Vasily, an alcoholic ladies’ man who probably was more afraid of his father and his friends than anything else.

Ultimately, THE DEATH OF STALIN works extremely effectively as a satirical attack on the Soviet Union, Stalin and his sycophantic supporters, communist tyranny, and government tyranny in general. Despite the reforms that Khrushchev and his friends, and even Beria, tried to institute after Stalin, these men were still brutal leftist dictators. To its credit, the movie shows not only that power tends to corrupt, but also that absolute power corrupts absolutely. A welcome surprise is a bit of dialogue from the female pianist who says she’s not afraid to die because she believes in God and in her salvation through Christ.

The big problem with THE DEATH OF STALIN is that it has abundant foul language, including many “f” words and several strong profanities. The excessive foul language prevents THE DEATH OF STALIN from achieving true greatness because it’s a sign of lazy writing, directing and acting.

THE DEATH OF STALIN also contains a scene where a man is shown being shot in the head, plus a scene where several other prisoners are executed. There are also some brief sexual comments. For example, Beria’s attackers angrily accuse him of raping political prisoners and even pedophilia. This content and the movie’s foul language warrant extreme caution.

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Past Factory

20+ Historically Accurate Movies That Got It Right

Posted: April 30, 2024 | Last updated: April 30, 2024

<p>Whenever the words "based on a true story" are at the start of a movie, it's hard not to get a little suspicious. Most Hollywood movies are going to take some dramatic liberties with historical events, whether it's to make them more interesting to watch or to make a complex chain of events more digestible.</p> <p>So stories get changed, plot points that didn't happen are added, and multiple people that a historical figure knew are compressed into one composite character. But while almost all biopics and historical movies are guilty of this to some extent, not all of them play so fast and loose with the facts. So we're celebrating the ones that got as much right as possible. Keep reading to learn more. </p>

Whenever the words "based on a true story" are at the start of a movie, it's hard not to get a little suspicious. Most Hollywood movies are going to take some dramatic liberties with historical events, whether it's to make them more interesting to watch or to make a complex chain of events more digestible.

So stories get changed, plot points that didn't happen are added, and multiple people that a historical figure knew are compressed into one composite character. But while almost all biopics and historical movies are guilty of this to some extent, not all of them play so fast and loose with the facts. So we're celebrating the ones that got as much right as possible. Keep reading through this list to learn more about these historically accurate films.

<p>True to his famously obsessive nature, Stanley Kubrick took great pains to ensure that everything we see in this Seven Years' War epic looked as it would have about 200 years prior. </p> <p>To give just a few examples, Jana Branch & John Izod wrote in the 2003 fall issue of <i>Kinema </i>that <i>Barry Lyndon</i> was shot on location in authentic great houses, and the actors wore fabrics that matched historical portraits and would have been in use at the time. Even the lighting was period-appropriate.</p>

Barry Lyndon (1975)

True to his famously obsessive nature, Stanley Kubrick took great pains to ensure that everything we see in this Seven Years' War epic looked as it would have about 200 years prior.

To give just a few examples, Jana Branch & John Izod wrote in the 2003 fall issue of Kinema that Barry Lyndon was shot on location in authentic great houses, and the actors wore fabrics that matched historical portraits and would have been in use at the time. Even the lighting was period-appropriate.

<p>The film <i>Rush</i> details the real-life rivalry between Formula 1 racecar drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda. The website <a href="https://informationisbeautiful.net/"><i>Information Is Beautiful</i> </a>said the film largely depicts the drivers' skills and knowledge, their respective arrogance, and levels of fame during the 1970s accurately. </p> <p>The same was true of Lauda's relationship with his wife Marlene, barring some speculation about their private conservations.</p>

Rush (2013)

The film Rush details the real-life rivalry between Formula 1 racecar drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda. The website Information Is Beautiful said the film largely depicts the drivers' skills and knowledge, their respective arrogance, and levels of fame during the 1970s accurately.

The same was true of Lauda's relationship with his wife Marlene, barring some speculation about their private conservations.

<p>While historian and author Ronald White wouldn't say that "every word" of <i>Lincoln</i> is true, he said it got the "dramatic core" of the months spent getting the Constitution's 13th Amendment passed right. Particular highlights included the film's depiction of William Seward's lobbying efforts and how it characterizes abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.</p> <p>And, of course, Daniel Day-Lewis' portrayal of Abraham Lincoln was about as perfect as it gets. White said Day-Lewis even walked and talked like Lincoln actually would have.</p>

Lincoln (2012)

While historian and author Ronald White wouldn't say that "every word" of Lincoln is true, he said it got the "dramatic core" of the months spent getting the Constitution's 13th Amendment passed right. Particular highlights included the film's depiction of William Seward's lobbying efforts and how it characterizes abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.

And, of course, Daniel Day-Lewis' portrayal of Abraham Lincoln was about as perfect as it gets. White said Day-Lewis even walked and talked like Lincoln actually would have.

<p>In an ironic twist, <i>Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World</i> may be more accurate to the naval military history of the early 19th century than it is to the fictional novel it's based on.</p> <p>That's because the plot was changed, but the details of the ship they're on, the costumes they're wearing, and even the surgical tools used on a 13-year-old midshipman were identified as historically accurate in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/movies/film-master-and-commander-on-the-far-side-of-credibility.html"><i>New York Times</i> review</a> by Jason Epstein. </p>

Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World (2003)

In an ironic twist, Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World may be more accurate to the naval military history of the early 19th century than it is to the fictional novel it's based on.

That's because the plot was changed, but the details of the ship they're on, the costumes they're wearing, and even the surgical tools used on a 13-year-old midshipman were identified as historically accurate in a New York Times review by Jason Epstein.

<p>In addition to being a widely acclaimed horror film, <i>The Witch </i>has also been renowned for its historical accuracy. As Merrill Fabrey wrote in <i><a href="https://time.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">TIME</a></i>, this was particularly reflected in the film's depiction of the Puritan character of 17th-century New England and its scarcity.</p> <p>The fears and frustrations of the film's characters were based on primary sources from the period, and director Robert Eggers used only natural light and candlelight while filming.</p>

The Witch (2015)

In addition to being a widely acclaimed horror film, The Witch has also been renowned for its historical accuracy. As Merrill Fabrey wrote in TIME , this was particularly reflected in the film's depiction of the Puritan character of 17th-century New England and its scarcity.

The fears and frustrations of the film's characters were based on primary sources from the period, and director Robert Eggers used only natural light and candlelight while filming.

<p>Although the characters in <i>All Quiet On The Western Front</i> didn't exist, they are meant to represent the average soldier during World War I. And both the film and its literary source material depict those soldiers' experiences as accurately as it gets due to the original author's experiences.</p> <p>According to <i><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Smithsonian Magazine</a></i>, that's because author Erich Maria Remarque had based his main character Paul Baumer's first-person narrative on his own experiences fighting in the trenches.</p>

All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

Although the characters in All Quiet On The Western Front didn't exist, they are meant to represent the average soldier during World War I. And both the film and its literary source material depict those soldiers' experiences as accurately as it gets due to the original author's experiences.

According to Smithsonian Magazine , that's because author Erich Maria Remarque had based his main character Paul Baumer's first-person narrative on his own experiences fighting in the trenches.

<p>Although <i>The Death of Stalin</i> speeds up its version of the real-life aftermath of Josef Stalin's death, the most seemingly unbelievable moments in the movie were actually among the most historically accurate.</p> <p>As Ellin Stein of <i><a href="https://slate.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Slate</a></i> wrote, Radio Moscow really did have a whole concerto repeated on the same night and got musicians out of bed because Stalin wanted a recording. Other examples include Stalin's death prompting the same chaotic mess of doctors and party members that the film depicts and Lavrentiy Beria being every bit as monstrous as he came across in the movie. </p>

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Although The Death of Stalin speeds up its version of the real-life aftermath of Josef Stalin's death, the most seemingly unbelievable moments in the movie were actually among the most historically accurate.

As Ellin Stein of Slate wrote, Radio Moscow really did have a whole concerto repeated on the same night and got musicians out of bed because Stalin wanted a recording. Other examples include Stalin's death prompting the same chaotic mess of doctors and party members that the film depicts and Lavrentiy Beria being every bit as monstrous as he came across in the movie.

<p>Detailing the final diplomatic talks and plans leading up to the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor before depicting the event itself, <i>Tora! Tora! Tora!</i> is widely regarded as one of the most historically accurate films of all time.</p> <p><a href="https://www.bu.edu/ihi/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Boston University's International History Institute</a> also credits the film for correcting the historical record of American military officials like General Walter Short and Admiral Husband E. Kimmell. </p>

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

Detailing the final diplomatic talks and plans leading up to the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor before depicting the event itself, Tora! Tora! Tora! is widely regarded as one of the most historically accurate films of all time.

Boston University's International History Institute also credits the film for correcting the historical record of American military officials like General Walter Short and Admiral Husband E. Kimmell.

<p><i>Grave of The Fireflies</i> was based on the book of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka<b>. </b>Its accuracy in depicting the horrors, uncertainty, and scarcity that marked life in Japan during World War II is dead-on for a profoundly sad reason.</p> <p>Namely, Nosaka based the book on his own experiences during that time. As Teresa Marasigan of <i><a href="https://www.esquire.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Esquire</a></i> wrote, the book was Nosaka's way of processing his guilt after losing his younger sister to starvation when he was 14 years old. </p>

Grave of The Fireflies (1988)

Grave of The Fireflies was based on the book of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka . Its accuracy in depicting the horrors, uncertainty, and scarcity that marked life in Japan during World War II is dead-on for a profoundly sad reason.

Namely, Nosaka based the book on his own experiences during that time. As Teresa Marasigan of Esquire wrote, the book was Nosaka's way of processing his guilt after losing his younger sister to starvation when he was 14 years old.

<p>The Martin Luther King biopic <i>Selma </i>was identified by the website <i><a href="https://informationisbeautiful.net/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Information Is Beautiful</a></i> as depicting the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King's involvement in it about as accurately as a movie can.</p> <p>From his call to Mahalia Jackson for a soothing song to the threatening phone calls he received to his clashes with J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon B. Johnson, both what happened in his life and who was around when it happened are true to the actual events. </p>

Selma (2014)

The Martin Luther King biopic Selma was identified by the website Information Is Beautiful as depicting the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King's involvement in it about as accurately as a movie can.

From his call to Mahalia Jackson for a soothing song to the threatening phone calls he received to his clashes with J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon B. Johnson, both what happened in his life and who was around when it happened are true to the actual events.

<p><i>We Were Soldiers, </i>depicting U.S. forces' first major battle during the Vietnam War, is considered a notable exception to Mel Gibson's track record of iffy historical performances.</p> <p>However, the accuracy of this film seems to depend on who you ask. Because while Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore (who Gibson played) told <i><a href="https://www.usnews.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">US News</a></i> that he considered the movie 60% accurate, his former comrade-in-arms Joe Galloway argued it was closer to 80%.</p>

We Were Soldiers (2002)

We Were Soldiers, depicting U.S. forces' first major battle during the Vietnam War, is considered a notable exception to Mel Gibson's track record of iffy historical performances.

However, the accuracy of this film seems to depend on who you ask. Because while Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore (who Gibson played) told US News that he considered the movie 60% accurate, his former comrade-in-arms Joe Galloway argued it was closer to 80%.

<p>The 1991 film <i>Black Robe </i>is based on Brian Moore's novel of the same name, telling the story of a Jesuit missionary traveling through the harsh wilderness to find New France with the help of the Algonquin people.</p> <p>The film was praised for its depiction of natives and the relationships between various tribes in the area at the time, in the 17th century. Upon its release, <i>Black Robe </i>won a Genie Award for Best Motion Picture.</p>

Black Robe (1991)

The 1991 film Black Robe is based on Brian Moore's novel of the same name, telling the story of a Jesuit missionary traveling through the harsh wilderness to find New France with the help of the Algonquin people.

The film was praised for its depiction of natives and the relationships between various tribes in the area at the time, in the 17th century. Upon its release, Black Robe won a Genie Award for Best Motion Picture.

<p>Although it may seem strange to describe a movie centered around a group of fictional characters as "historically accurate," that description has more to do with the setting than the plot.</p> <p><i>Saving Private Ryan</i> featured a harrowingly realistic portrayal of what it was like to storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. According to <i><a href="https://www.latimes.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Los Angeles Times</a></i>, the Department of Veterans Affairs had already fielded well over 100 requests for counseling just two weeks after the movie hit theaters.</p>

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Although it may seem strange to describe a movie centered around a group of fictional characters as "historically accurate," that description has more to do with the setting than the plot.

Saving Private Ryan featured a harrowingly realistic portrayal of what it was like to storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. According to The Los Angeles Times , the Department of Veterans Affairs had already fielded well over 100 requests for counseling just two weeks after the movie hit theaters.

<p>Although <i>Gangs of New York</i> is a fictional story, Martin Scorcese's crew went to great lengths to accurately recreate the Four Points neighborhood's size, building materials, and state of decay during the 1860s.</p> <p>And while he mentioned his quibbles to <i><a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">National Geographic</a></i>, historian Tyler Anbinder said the movie is largely accurate to the experiences of Irish immigrants at the time. In his words, "When the Irish first came to America, they were persecuted, and they literally did have to fight for their fair share of what America had to offer."</p>

Gangs of New York (2002)

Although Gangs of New York is a fictional story, Martin Scorcese's crew went to great lengths to accurately recreate the Four Points neighborhood's size, building materials, and state of decay during the 1860s.

And while he mentioned his quibbles to National Geographic , historian Tyler Anbinder said the movie is largely accurate to the experiences of Irish immigrants at the time. In his words, "When the Irish first came to America, they were persecuted, and they literally did have to fight for their fair share of what America had to offer."

<p>According to the website, <i><a href="https://informationisbeautiful.net/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Information Is Beautiful</a></i>, <i>Spotlight</i>'s depiction of the Boston Globe's investigation into the local Catholic diocese's now-infamous scandals happened largely as it did in the late 1970s. </p> <p>Some characters were composites of multiple people, but the meetings that the <i>Globe</i>'s journalists sat down for during their investigations were all documented as happening.</p>

Spotlight (2015)

According to the website, Information Is Beautiful , Spotlight 's depiction of the Boston Globe's investigation into the local Catholic diocese's now-infamous scandals happened largely as it did in the late 1970s.

Some characters were composites of multiple people, but the meetings that the Globe 's journalists sat down for during their investigations were all documented as happening.

<p><i>Zodiac</i> chronicles the real-life amateur investigation between 1968 and 1983 by San Francisco cartoonist Robert Graysmith into the infamous Zodiac killer's slayings. </p> <p><i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/international" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Guardian</a></i>'s Alex von Tunzelmann credits director David Fincher for his meticulous attention to detail in presenting the facts of the case and for his ability to show restraint when those facts are unclear or in dispute. </p>

Zodiac (2007)

Zodiac chronicles the real-life amateur investigation between 1968 and 1983 by San Francisco cartoonist Robert Graysmith into the infamous Zodiac killer's slayings.

The Guardian 's Alex von Tunzelmann credits director David Fincher for his meticulous attention to detail in presenting the facts of the case and for his ability to show restraint when those facts are unclear or in dispute.

<p>Although some of the property excesses and apparent willful blindness of financial leaders and regulators in the years leading up to the 2008 economic collapse seem exaggerated in <i>The Big Short</i>, the website Information Is Beautiful identified them in detail as true.</p> <p>Although Steven Eisman (played by Steve Carrell as Mark Baum) had less of a front-line role in his firm's investigations than the movie depicted, his interruptions that cut through the BS of the financial conferences he attended at the time were all real.</p>

The Big Short (2015)

Although some of the property excesses and apparent willful blindness of financial leaders and regulators in the years leading up to the 2008 economic collapse seem exaggerated in The Big Short , the website Information Is Beautiful identified them in detail as true.

Although Steven Eisman (played by Steve Carrell as Mark Baum) had less of a front-line role in his firm's investigations than the movie depicted, his interruptions that cut through the financial conferences he attended at the time were all real.

<p>Judging by what Captain Hans-Joachim Krug (who worked as a consultant for the film) told the <a href="https://www.usni.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer">U.S. Naval Institute</a>, it sounds like viewers are more likely to get historical accuracy from <i>Das Boot</i>'s lengthy director's cut than its theatrical version.</p> <p>Even so, the claustrophobic and terrifying experiences of a Word War II submariner shine through in a powerful way in both versions. However, the pacing of the depth charge attacks in the director's cut is considered more accurate to real life.</p>

Das Boot (1981)

Judging by what Captain Hans-Joachim Krug (who worked as a consultant for the film) told the U.S. Naval Institute, it sounds like viewers are more likely to get historical accuracy from Das Boot 's lengthy director's cut than its theatrical version.

Even so, the claustrophobic and terrifying experiences of a World War II submariner shine through in a powerful way in both versions. However, the pacing of the depth charge attacks in the director's cut is considered more accurate to real life.

<p><i>Waterloo</i> is considered a faithful rendition of the hundred days leading up to Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo. As Alex von Tunzelmann wrote in <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/international" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Guardian</a></i>, "The battle sequences are among the most realistic you're likely to see anywhere."</p> <p>Unfortunately, he also said that this accuracy comes at the cost of dullness, so be prepared for that.</p>

Waterloo (1970)

Waterloo is considered a faithful rendition of the hundred days leading up to Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo. As Alex von Tunzelmann wrote in The Guardian , "The battle sequences are among the most realistic you're likely to see anywhere."

Unfortunately, he also said that this accuracy comes at the cost of dullness, so be prepared for that.

<p>Although this <i>Come And See</i>'s depiction of a boy joining a Soviet resistance movement during the German invasion in 1941 is infamously hard to watch, that doesn't make the atrocities featured in the film any less true.</p> <p>And while it's considered a factually accurate film, its real strength — as identified by <i>Vanity Fair</i>'s K. Austin Collins — is in the film's emotional accuracy as it puts the viewer as close to the horrors its characters experience as any film can.</p>

Come and See (1985)

Although this Come And See 's depiction of a boy joining a Soviet resistance movement during the German invasion in 1941 is infamously hard to watch, that doesn't make the atrocities featured in the film any less true.

And while it's considered a factually accurate film, its real strength — as identified by Vanity Fair 's K. Austin Collins — is in the film's emotional accuracy as it puts the viewer as close to the horrors its characters experience as any film can.

<p><i>A Bridge Too Far</i> — which chronicles a disastrous attempt by Allied forces to break German ranks by seizing a series of bridges in the Netherlands in 1944 — is largely included in the canon of war movies that pay extensive attention to historical detail.</p> <p>And Alex von Tunzelmann of <i>The Guardian</i> considered this reputation well-earned. In his words, "Committed second world war buffs may spot microscopic inaccuracies, such as a few anti-tank guns being painted the wrong color, but overall the recreation of the battles was acclaimed by real veterans."</p>

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

A Bridge Too Far — which chronicles a disastrous attempt by Allied forces to break German ranks by seizing a series of bridges in the Netherlands in 1944 — is largely included in the canon of war movies that pay extensive attention to historical detail.

And Alex von Tunzelmann of The Guardian considered this reputation well-earned. In his words, "Committed second world war buffs may spot microscopic inaccuracies, such as a few anti-tank guns being painted the wrong color, but overall the recreation of the battles was acclaimed by real veterans."

<p><i>A Bridge of Spies </i>is a Cold War thriller depicting the real-life prisoner exchange brokered by American lawyer James Donovan at the behest of the CIA. </p> <p>According to the website <i>Information Is Beautiful</i>, the film accurately depicts the incidents that led to pilot Francis Gary Powers' capture. It also accurately portrays gadgets and techniques that intelligence agencies would have used at the time.</p>

Bridge Of Spies (2015)

A Bridge of Spies is a Cold War thriller depicting the real-life prisoner exchange brokered by American lawyer James Donovan at the behest of the CIA.

According to the website Information Is Beautiful , the film accurately depicts the incidents that led to pilot Francis Gary Powers' capture. It also accurately portrays gadgets and techniques that intelligence agencies would have used at the time.

<p><i>Fury</i> follows a Sherman tank crew heading behind enemy lines during the final months of World War II. Soon after the movie came out, <i>The Guardian</i> asked a real Sherman radio operator named Bill Betts how accurate the movie was.</p> <p>And he said the movie was realistic in depicting the main crew's Sherman as being outgunned by German tanks at the time. In Betts' words, "In open combat, we never had a chance. So, like in Fury, we always had to be one step ahead."</p>

Fury (2014)

Fury follows a Sherman tank crew heading behind enemy lines during the final months of World War II. Soon after the movie came out, The Guardian asked a real Sherman radio operator named Bill Betts how accurate the movie was.

And he said the movie was realistic in depicting the main crew's Sherman as being outgunned by German tanks at the time. In Betts' words, "In open combat, we never had a chance. So, like in Fury, we always had to be one step ahead."

<p><i>The Baader-Meinhoff Complex</i> chronicles the actions of a terrorist group called the Red Army Faction that wreaked havoc on the German elite during the 1970s. If anything, it may be too historically accurate for its own good.</p> <p>According to <i>The Guardian</i>, <i>Frankfurter Allgemeine</i> editor Frank Schirrmacher described the movie as authentic to a "heartbreaking" degree. Many family members of the group's victims also criticized the filmmakers for not warning them of the movie's contents and felt revictimized as a result.</p>

The Baader-Meinhoff Complex (2008)

The Baader-Meinhoff Complex chronicles the actions of a terrorist group called the Red Army Faction that wreaked havoc on the German elite during the 1970s. If anything, it may be too historically accurate for its own good.

According to The Guardian , Frankfurter Allgemeine editor Frank Schirrmacher described the movie as authentic to a "heartbreaking" degree. Many family members of the group's victims also criticized the filmmakers for not warning them of the movie's contents and felt revictimized as a result.

<p><i>The Battle Of Algiers</i> chronicles the resistance efforts of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale to overthrow French colonial rule, as well as the atrocities its members experienced at the hands of French forces. </p> <p>Although it was initially banned in France for these depictions, the film has maintained such a sterling reputation for historical accuracy that rebel groups and governments alike used it as a training film as recently as half a century after its release.</p>

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

The Battle Of Algiers chronicles the resistance efforts of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale to overthrow French colonial rule, as well as the atrocities its members experienced at the hands of French forces.

Although it was initially banned in France for these depictions, the film has maintained such a sterling reputation for historical accuracy that rebel groups and governments alike used it as a training film as recently as half a century after its release.

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