107 minutes of sarcastic Soviet skullduggery

Or, Moscow Pythons

You know how every movie that takes place in the past is inevitably ruined by the gleaming white teeth of its stars? Even if the filmmakers wanted to go for verisimilitude, one assumes audiences would recoil at the sight of an actual peasant’s mouth in the Napoleonic era.

So while we’re transplanting modern mores onto historical dramas, why don’t we make the events of yesteryear as dark, witty, and quick as they ought to have been?

That’s exactly what one of my all time favourite films does so well: