No Humor

One of the finest foreign movies I ever watched.

The Great is at it best when it sublimates the eternal, tone-agnostic political dilemmas – radicalism v incremental progress, choice v force – into nonsense games of one-upmanship. And though it revels too much in blunt matters of the flesh as state, the spectacle of arbitrary death, and the collapse of the personal and public, its portrayal of the yawning chasm between the court’s opulent depravity and the serenity a royal poker face remains sharp. For all its silliness, The Great understands a longstanding truth: public performance, whether in 18th-century Russia or now, can be, as one courtier puts it, “all a foolish game”.