Stalin's Wife (2005)
Runtime: 1 hr 44 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
As illuminating, trenchant and penetrating as any fiction film.
An intimate, chatty film, both cheeky and thorough, the kind of high-class historical gossip you might get if an eminent Soviet historian like Robert Conquest or Richard Pipes went to work for the National Enquirer.
By the end of its excruciating two hours, Stalin's Wife has brought us no closer to its subject than does the eerie stone bust that adorns her grave in Moscow.
If you have the slightest curiosity about the people and the period, Stalin's Wife is mandatory viewing.
Documentary filmmaking on the cheap, comprised primarily of familiar newsreel footage and shot-on-video talking-head interviews.
There's plenty of passion beneath this movie's unadorned surface.
Unless you're already into this stuff, it'll be hard to stay awake.
This dense biographical collage of images and memories of the Soviet dictator's second wife has a paradoxical quality.
There's interesting material about Soviet history, but searching for answers about the revolutionary's spouse turns out to be less than engrossing.


Top Critic