form of western propaganda.Having had a Russian girlfriend a couple of years ago at her hometown somewhere in Russia It's precise town is irrelevant me, a few friends of mine and her sister were having a drink and a laugh in her apartment.At some point we all had to name a historic person who was important to our country and someone we saw as role model, hero or whatever.When my girlfriend's 19 year old sister named Stalin I first assumed she began to develop a sense of sarcasm and I laughed at what I expected to be a joke. This infuriated her and so the game was suddenly over. Any arguments made in my defense by me and my friends mentioning some of Stalin's gruesome crimes committed upon his own people were received as US propaganda/Western lies.What some people also here fail to realize is that this is no Hollywood propaganda. The sequel of the book is called Kolyma, are those gulag camps western propaganda also? For the purpose of exaggeration: I wonder if Nazi Germany had not been defeated during world war 2, would we see many people here at IMDb in a post-NAZI Germany 70+ years later commenting on movies like Schindler's List or The Grey Zone, only to paint them with the same brush of Western propaganda?For some: please don't watch this movie if you have font memories of the Soviet Era.For everyone else: It's a nice flick with a great cast, go watch it!

a moral compass.

7/10 but tom hardy and noomi rapice were so convincing as the leads that I upped it to a 10. I was disappointed we didn't see much of Gary oldman as he is also one of my favourite actors but the small part he played was played very well. Everyone played there part to make an exciting story with a rather weird ending but oh well it was worth the watch anyway. :

"FEEL-GOOD" movie.Ignore the "history buffs" critics and go see it. You'll love it! Intense! 9 out of 10

want something special to see..compare the variance of tom hardy's acting and his skills of expression with his first scene when he was describing about his love of life how he met his wife with the last scene when he was trying to tell those children that he cant bring their parents back from dead..boy that was something special by tom hardy.. never thought he could have done something like this esp after seen him as bane..conclusion: MUST WATCH

film. Noomi Rapace is also very good. So whilst it is a long film, it never dragged for me at all. The plot works, the accents did not distract. After all in a US film do we worry that the characters have an American accent? So give it a go.

is a dark thriller - and without giving anything away, the build up and hatred toward the serial killer really sticks you to this movie - you simply want the killer to get the most gruesome death conceivable for what he does. Apart from the Hollywood aspect, this film depicts reality. This is how life existed under Communism and I think that message is just as compelling and important as the rest of the story - because it really depicted the terror and the suppression that millions of people lived under in the name of some douche bag's idea of "ideology". May Stalin forever lay dead and remembered for only one thing - he was a murdering asshole. Watch the film folks - I notice that the ratings were low, and I think that is an unfair assessment about the quality of this production.

Homo-Sovieticus who is still alive and kicking in today's Russia. And yet, no matter how much suffering and how many victims this monstrous system created, there are still communism apologists in today's Russia and elsewhere in the loony left western media world that just can't accept the simple truth that communism was as bad as Nazism. That's why they don't want you to see this movie, that's why they will tell you it's rubbish not worth seeing. Don't listen to them, just go and see this movie and decide for yourself.

suggest you to not listen it . In most of the cases these opinions are written by Russians who are brainwashed by communist/bolshevik/putinazi propaganda and THIS is the real propaganda. Of course, this is not historical movie, it's only a thriller, a criminal drama with fictitious characters but it can give you a glimpse into what USSR was under the rule of bolsheviks and Stalin himself. It was a country where fingering and distrust were almost a normal state. You could be denounced by your wife/husband, brother or son and be sentenced years in GULAG or be killed as an "enemy of the state" just for telling jokes about Stalin or expressing loudly your negative opinion about the party ideology or the country. This is true. I studied in Moscow, I have visited Russia many times and for ten years I have lived in one of the former USSR country in Central Asia. I met people many of whom are descendants of exiled "enemies of the state". Some of them, now in the age of 90, still remember that horrible time. I have heard a lot of stories, sad stories about late 30s, 40s under Stalin's regime. Remember, communists in USSR made a boy who denounced his father to the political police a hero and role model for all young people and children. Now Russian are trying to excuse and justify an oppressive system built on terror by murderer Lenin and his followers. Bolsheviks to keep the power, which was taken by force, killed millions of Russians and rest of them kept in fear but Russians still honor Lenin in his mausoleum in the heart of Moscow. Probably most of the negative reviewers haven't even watched this movie, they just follow the same pattern as was used in case of Solzhenitsyn's books: "I haven't read Solzhenitsyn but I reckon that ..." blah, blah, blah about how bad is he and his books . Don't be deluded by them.