Child 44 (2015)

Gary Oldman and Tom Hardy's Child 44 isn't going to be released in Russia because of the way it depicts, you guessed it, Russia.

Dust off your library card, and clear your schedule. If you're going to the movies for most of 2015, you've got some reading to do!

We're halfway through 2014, which means that the 2015 movie schedule is about to be finalized. The big blockbusters have already been announced, some years in advance. But there are loads of smaller, medium-sized films that are locating a spot on the schedule, waiting to reach audience-goers.

Celebrated French film star Vincent Cassel is the latest actor to join Daniel Espinosa’s Safe House follow-up, Child 44. Between his smoldering turn as a sneering dance instructor in Black Swan and his Cesar-winning performance in the epic gangster biopic Mesrine: Killer Instinct/Public Enemy #1, Cassel’s inclusion in any thriller’s cast is good news...

Based on the novel by Tom Rob Smith, the film is set in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and centers on Tom Hardy as a military police officer named Leo Demidov. Performing his duties he is horrified to pick up a case involving a string of brutal child murders. He digs further into the case, as his government keeps an eye on every move he makes and refuses to admit that the murders actually exist.

Based on the bestselling novel by Tom Rob Smith and directed by Safe House helmer Daniel Espinosa, the story centers on a Soviet military police officer named Leo Demidov (Hardy) who picks up a case involving a string of brutal child murders during the Stalin era. As he begins to dig further and further into the case, he realizes that his government is keeping a sharp eye on every move he makes, and refuses to admit that the killings are actually happening.

The plot, based on Tom Rob Smith’s 2008 novel, follows a disgraced MGB agent named Leo Demidov (Hardy), who investigates a series of brutal killings in the Soviet Union, back when the country was still under Joseph Stalin’s rule.

Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. When we think of on-screen pairs that can't stop working together, we generally think of people who star in films together, whose reunion is the kind of thing that the studio can avidly promote. But now that we clearly have to add Gary Oldman and Tom Hardy to the list, we're really, really unsure how they should fit in

It would seem that director Daniel Espinosa sees Joel Kinnaman as a kind of good luck charm. After all, their first collaboration, Snabba Cash, is what earned both of them international recognition and launched both of their careers in America.

Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace haven't even begun work on the upcoming Dennis Lehane adaptation Animal Rescue yet, but already they're getting set to team up for another film to do together. The two stars are now both in talks to join the cast of Child 44, the upcoming thriller based on the novel by Tom Rob Smith.

Though the Cold War is long over, there is still something satisfying and reliable about tales of Soviet Union stoicism and villainy, and both are at the center of British novelist Tom Rob Smith's chilling crime novel Child 44. Smith found inspiration for his novel, which focuses on a string of heinous child murders, in the shocking and true story of Andrei Chikatilo, a Ukrainian serial killer...