Director Olivier Assayas
Starring PAUL DANO, JUDE LAW, ALICIA VIKANDER & TOM STURRIDGE
Rated MA
Score 5/6

Vadim Baranov morphs from a young artist in 1990s Russia
into an influential government official and spin doctor at the heart of the government.

Putin is evil. I had to say, but in the spirit of balance, Putin might be nice if you get him in a social and don’t talk about his work, a point that was made about other historical figures in season 6 episode 6 of Red Dwarf (Putin’s social circle was briefly featured towards the end of the second act). But yeah, he’s evil; in a mysterious, violent, and unsolved deaths of his foes and critics kind of way. I just felt I had to say that before I got too far into this review. For those of you who might be wondering, The Wizard of the Kremlin is adapted from the debut novel Le mage du Kremlin by Political essayist & novelist Giuliano da Empoli. Also, it should be noted that Paul Dano’s character Vadim Baranov was inspired by Vladislav Surkov, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia from 1999 to 2011. Going into this, there was a part of me hoping for some sort of serious historical drama, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t; it was a political satire. There was a scene featuring Boris Yeltsin that made me think of Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog and Ivan Reitman’s Dave. There was also a joke about Pulonium that got a chuckle out of me. I’ll admit that I haven’t watched a lot of Paul Dano’s work; his role as Vadim Baranov was very soft-spoken, and his voice-overs throughout the movie linked nicely to Jeffrey Wright’s role in a conversational sort of way. Wright had a great monologue at the beginning of the movie. I enjoyed Jude Law’s performance as Putin and Tom Sturridge’s performance as Dmitri Sidorov. It was also good to see the Russian historical moments. I remember from the news.