The Death of Stalin (2017)

Director: Armando Iannucci

Cast: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend

Have I Seen it Before: Never. It feels like a film I’ve always been orbiting around watching, but kept missing it for one reason or another.

Did I Like It: I remember being very down on Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023) for a myriad of historical sins, the most egregious of them being that not only did every figure depicted speak English, they also appeared to be writing in English as well. Now, this film engages in a lot of the same chicanery as displayed in that film, with a cast that is blissfully content to either sound 100% American or British while they bicker their way to a post-Stalin politburo. Here, I’m fine with it.

Why? Because it’s a damn comedy is why. From all accounts, this is a fairly accurate depiction of a pointedly preposterous series of events. I don’t know what Ridley Scott’s excuse is, but Armando Iannucci is absolutely running laps around him with this one. My favorite gag in the entire film is when the politburo decides to pause mass executions, after which we cut to one final guy getting shot by a firing squad, and the next guy in line realizing he can just walk away. An absolutely perfect depiction, if ever there was one, of the insanity of a government out of control.

I don’t think the film would have hit the same as it did when it hit wider release in 2018. Applying the same sense of open-eyed cynicism Iannucci brought to American politics in Veep and British politics to the horrors of the peak of the Soviet system. We live in a time where it’s easy—and plenty rationale—to be afraid of the faceless horrors of our current system, but there’s more than a little bit of comfort to remember that it’s run by a bunch of childish fools who are just a few moments away from being completely removed from everything they reflexively hold dear.

Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Missed it in the theater.

Had a sense that there was probably a reason for that.

Did I Like It: Sometimes a movie will be helpful and give you its whole mission statement in the first line of spoken dialogue. It can be as simple as “Anything Goes” — Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), or as profound as “What came first, the music or the misery?” High Fidelity (2000). It can be in the high-class, as in bringing us into the mystery by whispering “Rosebud” Citizen Kane (1941), or as mass-market entertainment as when Lor San Tekka (Max von Sydow) opens Star Wars - Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) with “This will begin to make things right.” It doesn’t even have to accomplish the goal set forth, they’re just calling the shot before it’s taken.

So it’s telling that the first line of this, the seventh entry in the Jurassic series, that a wear worker of inGen mutters to one of their hapless colleagues, “How many more times are we going to have to do this?”

That’ll pretty much tell you everything you need to know about the film. It feels not only perfunctory, it seems disinterested in even going through the motions for the sake of everyone else. It may be a tall order to get the movie-going audience excited about dinosaurs walking the earth, but depicting a world that is as bored of this series as we are isn’t the way to accomplish that lofty goal. It may sufficiently divorce itself from what preceded—there is one references to Alan Grant, blissfully no references to whoever Chris Pratt’s character was, and only one scene with raptors—but the movie not only can’t justify its own existence, it refuses to even reckon with the issue.

We really don’t need another Jurassic movie, and now that Amblin has finally scraped the final elements of Michael Crichton’s original novel to adapt (rafting, anyone?) maybe we can all move on.

But then, it made plenty of money in an age where other seemingly sure bets can’t find the fairway. This may be the Jurassic World that we’re actually looking at.