Opens: March 29
Genre: Political comedy
Duration: 107 minutes

Is it tasteless to find humour in a totalitarian regime responsible for millions of deaths and massive repression? People have been asking that since Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch satirised Nazism respectively in 1940’s The Great Dictator and 1942’s To Be or Not to Be.

The answer then, and now, is a definitive no – not so long as the comedy is not at the expense of the victims, but at the oppressive system’s absurdity and the cruelty and all-too human flaws of those running it.

Fortunately those conditions apply to The Death of Stalin, directed and co-written by Armando Iannucci, widely revered for The Thick of It, the scathing British TV political satire that gave the world potty-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, and US political comedy Veep.

Adapted from a French comic book, the film manages to be both scabrously funny and bone chilling as it nails Stalinism’s absurdity and inhumanity. That’s a difficult line to tread, but Iannucci and his team pull off the challenge with panache. Astonishingly dexterous in its juggling of myriad sub-plots, the film...