"I've had nightmares that made more sense than this!"

Rating: 10/10 (5 August 2019)

This is the kind of brilliant parody and satire I enjoy the most. It has a Coen Brothers feel to it, and that would have been my guess if the actual director hadn't been Armando Iannucci, a name I'm not familiar with but one which I will surely look up for more of his work. To be sure, the subject matter isn't such to be trivialized or made the subject of derision, but it's done so well you have to overlook the historical record and go with the absurdity of it all. And who knows, perhaps the members of the Soviet Politburo during the Fifties actually were this discombobulated and farcical behind the scenes, making things up as they go and rewriting policy on a dime when situations dictated it.
I thought Steve Buscemi was the best here in his portrayal of Nikita Khruschev, but all the players turned in splendid performances. It probably helps if one were alive during the tumultuous period of the Fifties and early Sixties when a lot of these Russian names were in the news on almost a daily basis. Personally, my favorite moniker from that era was that of Anastas Mikoyan; it had just a wonderful ring to it. The actor Paul Whitehouse who represented Mikoyan was only introduced in a brief scene and didn't have anything to do during the rest of the story but I enjoyed hearing his name mentioned anyway. Jeffrey Tambor is conflictedly brilliant as Stalin's next in line, Georgy Malenkov, just one of the many characters here who had to perform a dual role on opposite sides of an argument to maintain a seat at the Committee table.
Best of all are those sidebar scenes of Russian citizens being rounded up and given the treatment, like falling down stairs and being questioned by authorities. The dialog is absurdly comical, and I thought it great when Khruschev prefaced his 'We Will Bury You' speech at the Polish embassy in Moscow in 1956. Here he was addressing the corpse of Beria when he stated "I will bury you in history, you fat f.....". Sorry I can't spell it out, but it was that kind of movie.
Anyway, this won't be everyone's best choice of entertainment, but I got a huge kick out of it, so much so I watched it twice in a row. Fortunately, one is able to criticize it and not wind up in a Gulag, so give it a shot and see if you don't come away with a skewed sense of Russian history. It's probably a lot closer to reality than we could ever imagine.