Jason Isaacs is great, as usual, and Andrea Riseborough (as she is in almost every movie she's in) is best in show here, and Rupert Friend is also excellent. The other players are all great - Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor, and Steve Buscemi.
Of course, because the film is describing life under totalitarianism, much of what we are watching is totally absurd (artists like Václav Havel and Sławomir Mrożek taught us this).
But Iannucci's film is uneven throughout. I found it hard to laugh at the people being senselessly assassinated by Lavrenti Beria and his men. It's designed to be funny, but it just didn't strike me as such. As I say, there was lots of funny stuff in the film, and the performances are great, but the tone seemed off to me. Totalitarianism in principle is very funny, and maybe if we were focusing only on bureaucracy I would have been able to enjoy myself more, but after all, many many people are being killed and tortured. I think it's sort of hard to oscillate between these two extremes.
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