The Inner Circle (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1991)

Andrei Konchalovsky may have had the best of intentions in scripting and directing the factually based story of Stalin's personal film projectionist, and a foreign audience could easily be duped into supposing that bona fide serious arthouse would be the result, but in actual fact one has to constantly remind oneself that this is not just cobbled together by a western studio with foggy notions of life in the big bad Soviet Union. This director was also behind Tango & Cash, after all.
Making the least of its production values, it's saturated with Russkie cliches from babushkas to cossack dancing and woefully uncertain of its tone: the first half plays out as comedy, with Tom Hulce as the lead reprising his gormlessly grinning naif Mozart, enthralled by being in the presence of the country's evil leadership, and then there's suddenly a switch to a tragic finale as he at last loses faith in the system, but with dialogue so hackneyed that it's actually funnier than the intentionally comic part. Special mention should be made too of Lolita Davidovich's portrayal of his feckless wife, which is as inept a performance as you're ever likely to see outside C-movie land.

3/10