Low life | 10 May 2018

Should I or shouldn’t I go and see The Death of Stalin, showing at the French village cinema last Sunday evening? To help me decide, I looked at what the compendious movie website Rotten Tomatoes had to say about it. The scores on the Tomatometer were disquieting. Ninety-six per cent of the 202 reviews by critics deemed it a hit, whereas only 78 per cent of 4,129 reviews posted by the general public agreed. Interesting. Normally, if a film is worth seeing, the film critics’ scores and the mob’s are roughly in alignment at 90 per cent or above. But when they differ by as much as this, one suspects that the film is pretentious or propaganda, or both.

I read a sample of the ‘top’ critics’ reviews. The Death of Stalin is both a comedy and a satire, they said. (An inevitable few thought it a satire of the current Trump administration.)