The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) review

"Old revolutionary" Leon Trotsky (Richard Burton), having been exiled from the Soviet Union, is living in Mexico City where he continues to write and spend time in his garden (he has bunnies, too!) but young Communist "Frank Jacson" (Alain Delon), on orders from Joseph Stalin, finds his way into the compound and kills his target with an ice axe.  Anyone with any familiarity with the situation won't find out anything remotely new since this is a feature-length obituary that fails to explain why Trotsky was such a powerful political figure and so deeply reviled by the rulers of his homeland, although Losey (who, according to the IMDb, apparently thought the script was "terrible") probably figured Burton could single-handedly carry the movie with his austerity.  The symbolism is particularly egregious: "Jacson" (whose real name was Ramón Mercader) has a vision of Stalin in the water and the sequence where he attends a bullfight couldn't be more literal, with him as the matador and Trotsky as the poor beast who winds up soaked in blood.  In today's Russia, many undesirables are reported as having "fallen" out of high windows....