Power games after Stalin's death, and some of your favourite actors on screen. Worth seeing!

Rating: 7/10 (4 February 2018)

Armando Iannucci is widely acclaimed for his political satire comedies ("The Thick of It", "Veep", "In the Loop") but here comes the project that might just become his first magnum opus.
Chances are that even if one is not interested in politics, one is at least a bit intrigued by the dark comedy about the notorious Soviet leader's death and power struggles that followed it.
Every big player in the vicinity, of course, wants a piece of the pie, including Khrushchev (played by Steve Buscemi), Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Molotov (Michael Palin), and Tarasov (Richard Brake).
Also appearing, Jason Isaacs, Olga Kurylenko, Paddy Considine, Adrian McLoughlin as the great papa Stalin himself, plus Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough as his drunkard son and hysterical daughter, respectively.
You read it right, the movie has a bunch of talented actors at the height of their "game", re-enacting one of the most large-scale power wars in Soviet history.
Not to mention a superb attention to historical detail which concentrates not only the Soviet glamour but how crumbly and shabby everything was behind the facades. What's not to like, eh?
As expected of Iannucci, the style is theatrical - relatively small and closed sets, a lot of fast dialogue and not many events or setpieces to speak of - but the humor is sharp and you can't really get anything less than great performances out of the cast this awesome.
To highlight some names, Isaacs is magnificent as the military leader, predatory and threatening as always in this kind of roles. Beale is superb as Beria, always out for blood and ready to bite, very playful, very mobile energy-wise. Tambor is doing his famous "greedy but cowardly" shtick, which I just love ever since first seeing that in "The Larry Sanders Show"...
There's only one reason that I have not rated this tasty piece of entertainment higher than 7. I liked it a lot but there's something to be said about Iannucci's breathless, tempo always up-to-eleven approach to storytelling which gets a bit exhausting in a piece that long.
Fast tempo would probably work well for a shorter period of time, but I felt that 106 minutes is too long for endless sprint. It needs some calmer interludes to let the viewer breathe and let all the greatness sink in.
Having said that, I want to find time to watch "The Death of Stalin" again in the near future, to reconsider its strengths and possible deficiencies. Because it feels like a movie that will grow on you.
I'd watch any movie just to see Tambor, Buscemi and Isaacs on screen together. But speaking in general, this was one of the most praised ones released in 2017. Go see it. A rare piece of entertainment that makes you google the historical facts later, just to know more about the real story.