MOVIE · 2017

The Death of Stalin

ComedyDrama107 min

Moscow, 1953: after Joseph Stalin drops dead, the men around him turn a national crisis into a frantic scramble for power. Steve Buscemi is Nikita Khrushchev, maneuvering against Simon Russell Beale’s Lavrentiy Beria and Jeffrey Tambor’s unsteady Georgy Malenkov as the Soviet leadership lurches from funeral plans to arrests, alliances, and public displays of loyalty. Armando Iannucci frames the Politburo as a nest of terrified operators, where bureaucratic ritual, personal vanity, and the threat of sudden violence all collide while nobody seems fully in charge of the army, the secret police, or the state.