Child 44

10/4/2016

**A war hero who turned a police officer struggles with his departmental feud.** It is a strange title. In the narration as well it does not properly reveals, more like an approximate count of something. It is a Russian story, I mean the Russian characters and the locations. It begins after the world war two, in Moscow, a top police officer caught between the departmental politics and a case. After the his investigation ended without a result, the sacked officer gets a lifeline to begin again life in another town. But the trouble follows him when he started to investigate the children's deaths. The result of the case brings the end to the tale with a tiny small twist. The actors were decent, not very impressive. Especially I understand since it was internationally produced, they pref

12/17/2022

**An overly ambitious film, but still an interesting one.** Honestly, I expected a little more from this movie. I found it on television, just by chance, but I had already heard about it, I'm not sure for what purpose, but I had the impression that it was a very good film. It's not as good as I expected, as it gets a little lost between politics and police mystery, and that ends up compromising the pace. It all starts with a drama where an MGB agent named Leo Demidov tries to protect his wife after a political prisoner denounces her as his accomplice. The effort pays off, but it's so obvious that he wanted to protect her that his superiors send him to an industrial city on the outskirts of Ukraine. Meanwhile, he will have to tell a friend that his son died in an alleged train acciden

1/12/2023

Despite Oldman's involvement, it lacks all the dark charm of HBO's Citizen X. There is less of a dual examination of both the system of the USSR and Chikatilo, and the film suffers from that. It's a little less compelling, the situation that unravels seems more incompetent than meddled. And the commentary that is left is more of the "this is what life was like under communism" and less of the "this is how the communist system interfered with the investigation and postponed his arrest" You can kind of taste the difference between the two, as they are both important, the cops look more incompetent with this version, and that is, I think, doing them a bit of a disservice. On the other hand, I doubt one would see either criticism if it were made today, so...take what you can get.