The Wizard of the Kremlin

Paul Dano is a “modern day Rasputin” to Jude Law’s Vladimir Putin in this smart, insightful slice of speculative political drama from Olivier Assayas (Carlos) and co-writer Emmanuel Carrère. Vadim Baranov (Dano) is a bohemian and intellectual turned TV executive who is approached to help persuade a KGB counterespionage expert, Putin, to stand for PM in the dying days of Boris Yeltsin’s Presidency. Putin takes a shine to Baranov, and he becomes his close advisor and spin doctor as the fledgling democracy reverts to autocracy over the next two decades.

Baranov is a lightly fictionalized character based on Vladislav Surkov, but the movie works both as an ethical drama and as a sobering history of the 21st century, an era of political chicanery and moral bankruptcy.

Essential viewing for understanding the highly sophisticated workings of a totalitarian propaganda state, whose tactics are but a slight refinement of Silicon Valley’s social media industry.

Travis Jeppesen, Sight and Sound

I found its thundering journey through several decades of recent Russian and world history revealing and (perhaps more importantly) enormously entertaining.

Bilge Eberi, New York Magazine