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. 

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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 theatre and TV executive tasked with creating and curating a successor to the ailing Boris Yeltsin. Will Keen (the Queen’s painfully tactful private secretary from The Crown) is brilliantly cast as Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch mastermind who talent-spots Vladimir Putin and believes (very wrongly) that he is placing an obedient puppet on the throne. And Jude Law proves once again that the real test of a great actor is playing someone other than themselves as he deadpans a daring performance as President Putin himself. 

The narrative, closely based on the original novel, is framed as a story within a story. An........

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