Film Review: The Wizard of the Kremlin

The Wizard of the Kremlin
Director: Olivier Assayas
Curiosa Films, Gaumont, France 2 Cinéma
In Theaters: 05.15.2026

In 2025, filmmaker, media personality and anthropomorphic mongoose Quentin Tarantino caused a stir with his completely uncalled-for attacks against There Will Be Blood and The Batman star Paul Dano, asserting in rather crude terms that Dano was lacking in screen presence. The talented actor needed just the right vehicle to prove Tarantino wrong, and with The Wizard of the Kremlin, Dano has miraculously found exactly not that movie.

In the turbulent aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, gifted young strategist Vadim Baranov (Dano) rises from avant-garde artist to influential television producer before becoming the chief political architect for an ambitious former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin (Jude Law, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Sherlock Holmes). As Baranov helps shape a new Russia through propaganda, corruption and calculated manipulation, the line between truth and illusion begins to disappear. What starts as a dangerous political game fueled by lies and power quickly escalates into repression, assassinations and war. Years later, having vanished from public life, Baranov finally breaks his silence by speaking to an American journalist, Rowland (Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction) and exposing the dark machinery behind the rise of modern Russia.

Director Olivier Assayas (Disorder, Wasp Network) tends to mark his films with the same sense of pacing as a car stopped on an almost imperceptible incline without the parking brake set, provided that the car has one flat tire. This dry adaptation of the novel by Giuliano da Empoli is not nearly witty enough to succeed as satire and is only mildly effective as a cursory chronicle of how the Soviet Union made way for Putin’s Russia. The fictional Baranov, loosely inspired by Russian businessman turned politician Vladislav Surkov, makes for a dreadfully dull protagonist. We’re supposed to see Baranov as a cunning Machiavellian genius, but the characterization feels designed to make him an effectively forgettable shadowman, and dialogue such as “Politics is really the only game worth playing” or “the future doesn’t give a shit about us” does little to convince us of his superior wit. As a narrator, he gets the job done, setting the scene and walking us through the timeline of events, but hyperbolic attempts at cleverness such as “without a drop of vodka, Zaldostanov left the Kremlin intoxicated” make even that feel more self-important and forced than anything. 

The most interesting section of the film in terms of Baranov’s machinations is the final third, as he gets into social media as his means of control, but it’s rather on the nose (“How do you break a wire? You twist it one way, and then the other.”), and it’s hard to escape the feeling that any audience who is sitting through this already knows this stuff. The Wizard of the Kremlin is most interesting when Putin is on screen, but those moments are few and far between, and it amounts to a glorified cameo.

Dano’s performance isn’t bad at all, but Baranov is such an aloof and stilted character that he’s never interesting. As the only American in a leading role, Assayas has Dano doing a pseudo-British high school drama club accent with soft Rs and saying “pahst” instead of “past,” and to his credit, Dano makes it work far better than it should. Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl), as Baranov’s on-again, off-again love interest Ksenia, is giving nothing of substance to do, and to say she’s there only to add romance and sex appeal would even be too generous. Ksenia adds padding to comfortably push the movie over the two-hour mark, period.Law, who forgoes prosthetics, looks so much like Putin it’s almost eerie, but the story is so focused on the titular inert mannequin that we only get tiny glimpses at who Putin is as a person or what drives him.

A film that could have been timely and essential comes out as plodding and pointless, and the most hopeful outlook I can give for The Wizard of the Kremlin is that it makes such a meager impression that it’s unlikely to be remembered when the Razzie nominations come out. —Patrick Gibbs

Read more film reviews by Patrick Gibbs:
Film Review: The Sheep Detectives
Film Review: Remarkably Bright Creatures

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