General zhukov death of stalin movie

“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 reco