This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

3 out of 10 is the best I can do for this unfortunate film. As with many movies over the past 20 years, almost all scenes appear to have been shot with the camera's lens closed down a number of stops, thereby producing a dark, dark scene & atmosphere, hardly ever actually called for by activity. Granted, the subject matter is dark and nasty, but that is no excuse for continual scenes in which we can barely make out faces even. Bad, bad, bad !Further, much of the audio is difficult to follow, owing in part to mumbled lines, contorted accents, plus interfering background effects & music. I had expected a powerful film with excellent cinematography, but instead was presented with this lemon. Unfortunate. Not recommended.

What a bizarrely dull waste. The successful Child 44 book had three or four things going for it: a stunningly atmospheric opening in a winter of starvation (here rushed over and its relevance weakened), a big reveal (cut), the evolving relationship between Demidov and his wife as they first realize the emptiness of what they thought they had and then build anew (next to Noomi Rapace's pained wisdom Tom Hardy's Leo is a nice picture of inarticulate bewildered loyalty, war hero as premiership footballer out of his depth, but it doesn't go anywhere) and a reasonable cat-and-mouse/chase plot. Trying to squeeze in most of the narrative of the book, but still dropping a couple of significant facts and incidents, the film manages somehow to be both too long and too rushed. The Demidovs hurry back and forth across Russia having unpleasant train incidents, the commuter experience from hell, and then the mystery gets addressed in a couple of brisk and largely unrelated bits of business at the end. Espinosa worthily films most of the book, but loses its sense and its drama. Child 44 has some vivid styling and performances (largely for decoration – Cassel is intimidating because he's Cassel, nothing more; Oldman has to resort to maximum shouting-and-spitting to get any drama into his scenes; Dance, as so often, is paraded as a token of film gravity), but it's otherwise as empty and lifeless as its Siberian wilderness.The Script Hack (https://thescripthack.wordpress.com/): if we're skipping the plot relevance of the starvation opening, we can skip the whole scene; if we're dropping the key bits of information gained from the mid-story return to Moscow, we can drop that whole sequence; and we could trim some of the secondary scenes (the last, for example, nicely true to the book, could be 30 seconds instead of five minutes). That would create much more time and space to pace and build the mystery and anticipation and drama of the hunt, and the relationships at its heart, and still leave a tighter more powerful film.

Tom Hardy speaking with a Russian pronunciation and the wrong grammar when everybody else speaks normal English is the most stupid thing I have ever seen in a movie. For this alone, I'll give it 3 stars. As for the plot, which is based on a real event, the famous Chikatilo murders, it's been done a lot better in another movie with Stephen Rea and Donald Sutherland. I don't remember the title,though.

So this is how Russia was like during the days of the USSR, just absolutely horrible all with a broken law system and having absolutely no freedom.The film itself was too awfully depressing and sad in a grim way, all this just made the film incredibly dull. There was absolutely no sense of nice things to come, just more bad news and the story was far too incredibly hard and confusing to follow.I just didn't like this film despite this film having good talented actors like Gary Oldman. Most of the film was simply too boring and uninteresting.I would seriously recommend everyone to avoid this film, a film this boring and hard to follow is not worth watching.