Review: “The Death of Stalin”

A film about the final days of Joseph Stalin, and the aftermath, done as a comedy? Well you better believe it, Armando Iannucci's "The Death of Stalin," adapted from the French graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, flies on the fumes of its own wild, wacky invention. It's unlike anything I have seen before. Its mix of slapstick laughs mixed with stunning tragedy is rarely done in this kind of brilliantly realized way. Iannucci is the British political satirist that gave us 2009's nastily comedic "In the Loop," which took place in British parliament, and, more importantly, HBO's Veep, which had a never-better Julia Louis-Dreyfuss scrambling to maintain sanity in a rambunctious White House she wants to take over as her own.

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