Full Movie Reviews
Rating of
4/4
Don't Wanna Miss This Party
SIngli6 - wrote on 02/25/2021
Armando Iannucci's last foray into cinema, the beloved In the Loop, was to my mind a failure. It could never find a way to utilize the more extensive visual language a comedy film of the cinema affords. You have the full attention of your audience, a big screen to fill with all sorts of rich detail, and a big budget; don't just stretch a 30-minute script to feature length.
Well, Iannucci has listened and learned. Sight gags do not inundate the film, but rather come precisely when they need to. Even though Iannucci's greatest strength lies in his obscene verbosity, never does the film's pace fall sacrifice to extended scenes of characters insulting or intimidating each other. Rather they are dispersed between moments of outrageously dark physical comedy that deliberately get darker …
Rating of
2.5/4
"The Death Of Stalin"
Yojimbo - wrote on 08/15/2019
Upon the death of Josef Stalin in 1953, his fellow party members jostle for position in an attempt to wrest power for themselves.
The Death Of Stalin has invited comparison with Dr. Strangelove because of its depiction of serious geopolitical events as farce, but Armando Iannucci's film has rather more in common with his previous foray into political satire In The Loop. Like that film, the characters are portrayed not as political colossi but as a fallible, corrupt and self-serving bunch all climbing over each other to find advantage. Stalin himself is portrayed as a kind of East End gangster who matter of factly uses murder for convenience and his lackeys as weak-willed sycophants who cannot wait to climb out from under his shadow; in fact much of the farcical black comedy comes from …
