A Gentleman in Moscow

I LOVED the book LOVED IT . I have anxiously waited for the adaptation .

1) DEAR PRODUCERS ... stop rewriting history !! The Black actors were great ! BUT there were basically no black in the Soviet Union then and now . This drives me CRAZY. Something campy like Bridgerton, I could ok , let it go . BUT not in a serious show where the HISTORY is central to the plot .

2) I was not expecting Ewan McGregor as Rostov. I am DELIGHTED by his performance. I think he did FANTASTIC .

3)The directing and cinema photography was sublime.

4) The actor that plays the evil commie hotel manager did a wonderful job .. I have pure hatred for him.

I gave this 8/10 because of color blind casting. I would have done less except everything else was superb .

I loved this series, especially Ewan McGregor is as excellent as always & so was the actor who played his captor. The set was magnificent!!!

My only complaint for a beautifully written and Art Directed series is the utterly ridiculous and insensitive "diversity " casting. What an insult to all Russians that their culture is trivialised by casting people of all different ethnicities in roles that are historically completely incorrect. Millions died in this revolution and each culture deserves the respect by movies and TV to not smother it in silly PC characters. Would they remake ROOTS with an Asian cast? No, because that would be an insult to that culture. It's also so distracting as you cannot suspend your disbelief when the clang of the casting smothers every scene.

A Gentleman in Moscow is a wonderfully entertaining novel, full of pathos and subtlety.

I recently read an article where the author Amor Towles gave the green light on this adaptation and is Executive Producer. So I believed it to be in safe hands.

After watching two episodes I can say the cinematography, production and costume design are top rate. The casting is not. Ewan McGregor is a fine actor, however he cannot disguise entirely his Scottish accent which is jarring for a Russian Count. Some of the other actors come across as caricatures.

Because of the diverse casting policies now, one of the Russian Bolsheviks is played by a black man with dreadlocks which clearly would not exist in the 1920's.

History whether fact or fiction should be accurate in every way in my opinion.

I won't be bothering with the next episodes. I want to keep my memories of the book intact.

Whoever came up with such a brilliant idea as casting black/brown or clearly "Mediterranean" people as ethnic Russians deserves the order of the Soviet Union's labor champion.

For someone who saw the USSR as it was before its fall, this series is some kind of black comedy. And it's a shame - because there is potential in the script and execution.

Unfortunately, such good material fell victim to contemporary politics which perfectly resembles the communist Soviet madness. It's a bit like irony made a big circle and kicked the creators in their bare buttocks.

There is also a lack of "Russian soul", in both positive and negative sense. You can feel that this is a Western vision of the East created without "physical" knowledge of the issue "Russia is a state of mind" - this is a saying that requires a deeper understanding to properly convey it.

This is a well-written and well-acted series. It's nice when a show or movie does not have to depend on special effects and action to be good.

As others have mentioned, I just have trouble believing some of the casting. It's bad enough that most of the actors have English accents. Having more Russian actors, or at least actors that look and sound Russian would have been preferable.

The most unbelievable aspect of the casting is the number of actors of African descent. I have a hard time believing there were that many (if any) people of African origin in Moscow at that time, and I'm sure none that would hold a position like Minister of Culture. Very unbelievable. I know when I visited Russia (including Moscow) around the year 2000, the only African people I saw were young, male African exchange students going to a university, and I saw less in all my travels around Russian than I see in one episode of this TV series.