How Putin got the Hollywood treatment
Sometimes life disappoints you in interesting ways. I hated Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 book The Wizard of the Kremlin, a fictional political thriller about the dawn of Putinism, with a shuddering passion. I had, therefore, been looking forward to despising the film version when it arrived in cinemas last month, too. Yet it turns out that TWotK, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, is an impressive film: visually stunning, well cast, a straight story well told. Paul Dano (the greasy-faced young preacher from There Will Be Blood) plays Vadim Baranov, the fictional “Wizard” of the title, a whizkid theater and TV executive tasked with creating and curating a
