Child 44 (2015)

Hardy is immaculate as Leo, from accent to demeanour. Now on his fourth film with Hardy, Oldman is a pleasure to watch, and even the smallest of roles have been carefully cast, with the likes of Vincent Cassel, Paddy Considine and Clarke all enjoying their moment.

This $50 million Ridley Scott production does benefit from strong performances and a few worthy scenes that director Daniel Espinosa (Safe House) pulls off with an effective amount of grit. Yet the movie doesn’t really captivate the way it should, and as the manhunt stretches on it actually diminishes in suspense, ultimately overstaying its two-plus-hour running time.

Calling Child 44 a mash-up of “Dr. Zhivago” and “Silence of the Lambs” doesn’t do enough to capture how strange it is.

I'm baffled by the screenplay credit. Richard Price is a muscular writer, and he's done some great work in the crime world over the years, but this feels like a screenplay by someone who has never written a film before, full of first-draft dialogue and weird structural and tonal issues. It's almost amazing how tone-deaf it is.

Part serial-killer thriller, part old-school anti-Soviet propaganda, Child 44 plays like a curious relic of an earlier Cold War mindset, when Western audiences took comfort that they were living on the right side of the Iron Curtain, and relied on movies to remind them as much.