Diagonaldi Very well executed

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Bardlerx Strictly average movie

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

generationofswine It could have been better. So why the 10? Stalin is sort of human. People like him, like Hitler, like so many other embodiments of evil are exceedingly easy to dehumanize, to make them a devil and not a man.Stalin does a pretty decent job of showing the blindingly evil side of the man and still giving him a human feel. It makes him accessible.So why could it have been better? Stalin was a revolutionary. He was active from the start and played a major role on the Bolshevik side. He was the Soviet premier and he forced a backwards nation to industrialize in a single generation and that is a global record in itself. He fought WWII and crippled the Nazi war machine at the battle of Kursk.The movie should have been an epic. There is a much greater story to tell there. Instead it is tourniqueted. It is cut short and anyone with even a simple enough grasp of Stalin to vaguely know who he is gets the feeling that they are missing out.They made Che, years later, into two epic films. A life as important--and evil--of Stalin deserved more than a made-for-TV movie despite the quality.

climbingivy Stalin made by Home Box Office and MGM/Warner Brothers pictures studio mega corporation is one of the last movies made by Home Box Office that was fairly good.My main problem with Stalin is that I could not get past Robert Duvall playing Joseph Stalin.Joseph Stalin and Robert Duvall do not look anything alike at all.Why couldn't Warner Brother/Home Box Office go to Russia and search for a Joseph Stalin lookalike?You know that they have the resources to do so.I kept thinking throughout the entire movie that I was watching and listening to Robert Duvall.The settings,cinema photography and the music were gorgeous,rich to be exact, like a beautiful Russian tapestry.The movie tried but could not deliver due to Robert Duvall who was terrific in Tender Mercies.I Have This Movie on DVD.

carsblair I watched Stalin and think that it is a good portrayal of Stalin's life. I would have liked to see more actors such as people playing Hitler instead of showing stock footage. One downfall of the movie was that it skips over Stalin's involvement in WWII and just starts the movie in 1917. I would have liked to see more of Stalin's childhood in the movie and maybe some cold war clips near the end of his life. Overall, I was pleased with the content. Stalin was one of the worst people to ever live, and this movie does well in showing how bad Stalin really was. I also like that the movie is told from the perspective of his daughter, Svetlana. This gives the movie a more personal touch to what his life was really like. The movie also used Robert Conquest as one of the contributors, which is good because he wrote Stalin: Breaker of Nations in 1992, also at the time of this movie.

Gordon I was worried that this film would have portrayed Glorious Comrade Stalin in a bad way, but, instead, it shows him in his true glorious light: he loved his kids and he knew how to deal with counter-revolutionary traitors.Unfortunately, the movie didn't explain well enough why it was necessary to have enemies of the people like Kirov, Bukharin, Yagoda, Zinoviev and Kamenev executed.While they mentioned that Svetlana was living in England, they should have mentioned that she defected to the west like the traitor to the Motherland she was.