Film Review - The Wizard of the Kremlin (2026)

The Wizard of the Kremlin stars Paul Dano as Vadim Baranov a Russian TV producer who is recruited in the 1990’s to help Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) rise to power in a post Cold War Russia.

The Wizard of the Kremlin is the kind of movie that feels like catnip for me, a historical drama about a real life figure and the history they create as well as the history we can learn from but this movie while it has some good archival footage simply does not tell that story very well.

Firstly this movie feels so episodic that title cards literally come up on the cinema screen and after a while I started to think that perhaps this should’ve been a streaming series for Netflix or Stan or Prime Video because there you could have taken the time to really dive into the history of post Cold War Russia, the drinking years of Boris Yeltsin (I still remember the news headlines about him as well as shows like the Simpsons making jokes about him) and how someone like Putin could rise to power and hold it with an iron grip because he is a fascinating figure for better or worse.

And Jude Law does a great job as Putin in this movie and I had my doubts about him in that role after seeing the trailer but happily I was wrong, he has the facial expressions down pat and shows off the ruthlessness and the drive of the man very well but sadly he is in so little of the film that he feels like an afterthought and we don’t really see any of the ruthlessness that he in real life is known for apart from a tiny bit towards the end of the film.

Instead we get many scenes of Paul Dano as Vadim talking in a slow voice and very softly and at 2 and a half hours it just feels like it goes on and on and on and I wanted more of Jude Law in the film, Jeffrey Wright and Alicia Vikander are good in their roles but they like Law come and go.

And in the end what should be a thrilling and compelling story with parallels of history running through its veins ends up a dull slog to sit through and there is a far far better movie here waiting to get out.

And so that was the Wizard of the Kremlin and this spell did not work for me, it should be one of my favourites of the year and instead its one of the worst especially with a fascinating person at the heart of this story that ends up feeling sidelined and to the movies detriment, 1 out of 5.