ReaderKenka
Let's be realistic.
Ortiz
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Skyler
Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
Cheryl
A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.
clynn05
Would have changed one thing... at the end... Mom says; "I think you did a bad thing and you know you must be punished." Would have been more appropriate to say, 'and you know you need to take responsibility'. Also included I think should have been, 'you can't be a bad person, or you wouldn't be feeling sorry... that says you did a bad thing, but you are not inherently bad.' Heartwrenching show. Well played. Hard to know how it would play in real life. Really, really, hard, and heartwrenching. Acting was all very good. The way the story developed was very realistic and provided just enough suspense and doubt. I can imagine every parent would dread such a thing ever happening to them, and pray that it never does.
Domenico Scarlatti
My wife and I were spellbound. This has engaging characters; a subtle plot and excellent performances.The reason that the plot is so mesmerising is that it is so feasible. It is totally believable that a young boy could panic and do something, which he then sees is stupid. It is totally believable that the family and step family will act as they did. The intra-family tensions have an inevitability,which mirrors real life.As the two sides of the family start to fragment under the pressure of suspicion the feeling is that, like a Greek tragedy, they may not want to do so but nothing can stop it happening.There is excellent directing and first rate performances both from the lead actors and the young actors who play the family.I saw it as a single piece, rather than the original two. It is better viewed as a single whole! We would absolutely recommend this!
trapp_p
I have just finished watching 'A Mother's Son' on the ABC in Australia. It was shown as a single 2 hour story and I think that helped maintain the tension. I am at a loss to work out what program one of my fellow reviewers was watching, perhaps the fact that he remembers 'Billy Cotton's Bandstand' is an indication of his age (we are talking 1950's here), but the plot was certainly not 'East Enders' and 'over the top'. The other review pretty well sums up the movie, it was tightly written and extremely well acted. It is typical of the current crop of UK drama, good casts, good scripts and a big dose of conflicting emotions. In many ways it was similar to another excellent production "Broadbeach", although that was a much longer drama and more complicated plot-wise. Room for a lot of extra red herrings. I agree that the tension was well maintained, I could understand the mixed emotions which Rosie felt, although I was pretty sure by half way through that she was backing the wrong horse; her son was the culprit, or at least an accomplice.
badajoz-1
This was hyped up as gripping - NO IT WAS RUBBISH! The plot was thin, the characters uninteresting and straight out of the East Enders over-emotional teleland, the writing way way over the top, the direction just plagiarised 'The Killing,' and the sheer boredom of it all sent you to bed screaming at today's audiences and so-called TV critics that are prepared to put up with such awful cr**. There might not have been a golden age of TV forty years ago, but this rubbish would not be able to stand comparison with 'Billy Cotton's Bandshow'! Lazy, repetitive, shallow, police episodes absolute crud, I cannot go on. But I will poke a last dig - How many times in Episode 1 did the script include the line 'Are you alright?' - ten, fifty, a hundred?
