Over all, the movie was good. It won four Emmy awards and three Golden Globes, so it was well received by film critics. Historians may not like the way in focuses to much on the interpersonal relationships between Stalin and other members of the Politburo at the expense of a more historical based narrative. This was because the producers relied on the memories of Stalin's daughter Svetlana, who wrote the lines used by the narrator of the movie, and the book "This I can not Forget" by Anna Larissa Bukharin.
Since Anna Larissa Bukharin was the second wife of Nikolai Bukharin and the major written primary source for the movie, Bukharin comes out smelling like a rose. This can be seen in the actors of the cast. Robert Duvall is a fine actor and the make-up artist did an excellent job disguising the fact Robert Duvall was to tall and did not look very much like Stalin at all. The actors they cast to play other Bolsheviks in the movie all looked a lot more like their real, actual historical counter parts. With the exception of Nikolai Bukharin. The actor Jeroen Krabbe was cast as Bukharin and he looked nothing like the actual Bukharin.
So much of the movie looks at what took place, behind closed doors. It relies on one source, which is the only unedited account of what happened to the upper echelons of the politburo during the Great Purge of the late 1930s. Her book was published in Russian, during the Glastnost era. It received good reviews by the Soviet press of the time. Historians give it far more creditability than the book "Kremlin Wives" which out sold it during the late 1980s. Kremlin wives is dismissed as a Kitty Kelly treatment of history, that makes wild and unsubstantiated claims. Anna Larissa Bukharin's book plays it much closer to the vest. Anna was a close friend to Stalin's second wife. They were both in their twenties and married to much older men. Anna Larissa Bukharin accepts the "party line" that Stalin's second wife committed suicide, because while there is circumstantial evidence to the contrary, it is not enough to convict Stalin for murdering his own wife.