Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

basilisksamuk I'm at a loss to understand why this episode scores so highly. To my eye this is an astoundingly dull entry in the series. Most of the episodes suffer to some extent by being overly lengthy but this one in particular is stretched beyond the bounds of reason. It might have made a decent 90 minute programme but three hours is an insane length for this material. Every point in the procedure is dragged out to such an extent that it doesn't matter if you fall asleep at any point because the plot will not have advanced when you wake up half an hour later. I'm a big fan of Prime Suspect but lets not pretend it is without faults. This has hardly any of the characters we have seen before and the new team Tennyson manages are exceptionally dull. Even the sub-plot of how she is oppressed, this time by being too old, has worn thin. The premise is a good one but the direction is pedestrian and the script is poor. This is the only Prime Suspect episode that should be avoided.

Tahhh The only remark I wish to add to the other reviews is that the music accompanying this particular mini-series of the "Prime Suspect" series was particularly appealing, I think.So often, the music is an irritant or a distraction, whereas in this thriller, I felt it enhanced the filmed drama greatly. The soundtrack employs much East European singing, as well as Eastern-looking music from the Moslem cultures of the Adriatic provinces, and used this to help make the victims of the crimes presented more sympathetic to us.I found the spirited dance music, with a heavily middle-eastern, percussion-and-plectra sound, employed during the exciting chase scenes, especially effective.It's a sad story, and a police-thriller, and while I wouldn't say it transcends its genre completely, it does manage to provoke a little thought about principles, about honor, about cruelty, and about integrity and behaving justly.Very enjoyable when you're in the mood for a thriller!

El Cine With this sixth season, PBS promoted the "Prime Suspect" movie series from its "Mystery!" block to the "Masterpiece Theatre" one. This would suggest it's some sort of highbrow program, but no. How the mighty have fallen. PBS has come a long way from David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and the earlier seasons of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. A long way down. It was bad enough back in 2002 with the sensationalized adaptation of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" with Richard Roxburgh as Holmes. That production gave us lovingly lingering shots of Holmes taking drugs during his case, a police officer slowly sinking to his death in quicksand, and quick cuts of a corpse on a morgue table post-autopsy, with a terrified expression frozen on its face and big stitches running across its body (none of these things were in the book, a telling sign of how PBS decided to sensationalize the story). Then there was the Inspector Lynley mystery whose first scene showed the bloodied corpses of a dog and a decapitated man, both killed with an axe. I quit those "films" after a little while, not wanting to waste any more time. I did the same with "Prime Suspect 6." The critics who are too kind to this series on account of Queen Helen Mirren needn't bother with their paeans. Maybe Mirren really is a great actress. Maybe Denzel Washington is too, but that doesn't mean we have to praise "John Q." As for "Prime Suspect 6," it would seem that PBS has now gone all the way and started putting exploitation flicks on their channel.I didn't catch this show when it premiered on TV, but recently borrowed it on DVD. Things started off poorly enough with the usual cop drama clichés. Someone discovers a corpse brutalized in the fashion of the series, which leads to police procedural scenes that manage to be both busy and boring – lots of trucks, barricades, and investigators in blue scrubs. We also get the burnt-out cops, office politics, "naturalistic" acting, comic relief supporting characters, camaraderie among the lower ranks, and a world-weary coroner who provides further wry humor.Even worse, the show doesn't just want to be an entertaining mystery story; it wants to Make a Point. Not that this is a new thing with "Prime Suspect," which in the past has looked at racism, corruption, etc. This year's themes are war crimes, refugees, and the suffering of the underclass (mostly immigrant racial/ethnic minorities) who provide cheap labor in thankless jobs. We watch a stuffy English politician lecture about illegal immigrant criminals "swamping" England and its undermanned police force. There's a tour of the upstairs-downstairs world of a hotel where the white, suited manager works on the posh first floor, but the basement is full of ethnic types stuck with the real dirty work. A black man who works in said basement reports how the Bosnian murder victim worked 12-hour shifts 6 days a week. We are also told this woman was tortured with ritual cigarette burns many years ago, just as she was right before she died.The film pays lip service to the dignity of the victim when a detective lectures his subordinate not to degrade the corpse with jokes. The filmmakers are such hypocrites, for they have no qualms about filming a later scene of this woman's autopsy featuring right-up-in-front shots of the corpse's torso and throat skin peeled wide open to reveal the insides in great detail. Showing a stitched-up corpse like in "Baskervilles" wasn't enough. The woman is made into a grotesquerie show, and the viewers are invited to gape at the lurid spectacle of her cut-up body.This is what really finished it for me. First we're looking at a mundane scene somewhere else, and suddenly the camera jump cuts to the autopsy. The filmmakers were obviously going for shock effect. They should know better; this sort of grotesque imagery is not something that should casually show up on TV, and can deeply disturb people, myself included. The above-mentioned "John Q" used the exact same sort of crotch-grabbing when it made a jump cut to a heart transplant surgery, followed by close-ups of the chest cavity.How to stick with the movie after this insult? How absurd it would be for the viewers to remain at their schooldesks like good children and keep listening to the "serious" social commentary (let alone the mystery, which to the filmmakers is secondary) when it comes alongside gore effects in cheapie horror flick tradition.Shame on director Tom Hooper, producers David Boulter and Rebecca Eaton, writer Peter Berry, and the other filmmakers, and shame on PBS and WGBH.

gray4 The Prime Suspect plays and mini-series have provided benchmarks for TV drama for a decade. The latest, Prime Suspect 6, raises the bar again. This two-part series is far more than a crime drama. Helen Mirren gives a complete performance, clever, vulnerable, confused, determined in turn. It is a magnificent sustained piece of top-quality acting.The supporting actors are equally strong, from Frank Finlay as Mirren's elderly father to the Bosnian victims and villains, whose tortured history DS Tennison (Mirren) unearths. They are helped by the quality of Peter Berry's script and Tom Hooper's direction. The story line is more complex even than previous Prime Suspects, involving Mirren in a terrifying visit to Bosnia in a search for the truth that neither the British nor the Bosnians want uncovered.In short, four hours of gripping, unmissable drama.