Having spent much of this century fashioning such delicate fancies as Personal Shopper and The Clouds of Sils Maria, Olivier Assayas returns to the muscular geopolitical storytelling of Carlos, his biopic of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, with this sprawling attempt to map the ideological transformation of post-Soviet Russia through the rise of Vladimir Putin. Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin opens by insistently declaring itself fiction. It is, rather, a lightly fictionalised biopic of Vladislav Surkov, architect of the modern Kremlin, a mysterious figure in the West save for a few choice sightings in such similarly ambitious projects as Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self and HyperNormalisation. What follows is a dense, exhaustively narrated account of power, media manipulation and political storytelling…-Irish Times