Critic Reviews

I found its thundering journey through several decades of recent Russian and world history revealing and (perhaps more importantly) enormously entertaining. And by utilizing Law’s charisma to approximate Putin’s anti-charisma, it gives us a villain who is chilling and believable. I can’t wait to see it again.

The Wizard of the Kremlin is one of those rare dramatized histories that seamlessly blends facts with fiction.

The picture sometimes plays as an amalgam of Soderbergh’s “Che” and Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” only—and this is the crucial point—with the volume turned down from 10, or 11 for that matter, to about 4.

The film bounds ambitiously through fifteen years of the Baranov-Putin alliance.

Assayas and his team have created an indelible portrait of contemporary Russia, “a prison the size of a country” as it's called, one that perhaps only an outsider could ever get away with.

It’s a useful framework for understanding leaders around the world, and Baranov is the ideal cipher, someone who intimately understands how easily people’s minds are swayed and molded.

Even among all the fictions, audiences will find more truths about modern Russia than they’ll get from most news broadcasts.

The weakness of “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” aside from the fact that at 136 minutes it’s a little too long, is that it follows the less interesting character of Baranov. But this isn’t Dano’s fault. He can’t make this fictional fellow more interesting than Putin.

Despite being overwritten in places, the screenplay is the real star of the show in The Wizard of the Kremlin. Full of astute observations and dryly humorous quips, it’s gratifying to listen to. Assayas’ film is catnip for followers of political machinations, even if more casual viewers may find it as unconquerable as Russia has proved to be over the centuries.

A screenplay dense with incident and ideological discussion is carried efficiently by fast-moving, sleek direction and sumptuous mise en scene that catches the tone of a changing society and its sudden explosion of capitalist excess. Yet it never quite comes to life as a character sketch.