The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Tim Roth plays the notorious serial killer John "Reg" Christie with bone-chilling eeriness, a masterly performance to no small extent aided by the cinematography and lighting, which would have had Hitchcock nodding in approval, and which borders as closely on the exagerrated as it gets without overstepping the line (in my opinion). The set design provides the appropriately grim backdrop of the poorer areas of 1940s and 1950s London, and the soundtrack is certainly enough to make anybody lie awake wondering what might be lurking under the floorboards of the house you just moved into. The story is very well told, leaving enough for the viewer's imagination to add to the horror as the ghastly details creep into your mind. But there is a piece missing at the very end, as if the director suddenly realised that the allotted running time was quickly running out, and had to cut out a large chunk without forethought. That, unfortunately, takes away a few stars from what would otherwise have been a little masterpiece, but which is now left marred by an ending that seems oddly thrown together with too many loose ends dangling. Nevertheless, it's well worth a watch - you'll never look at your balding uncle the same way again.

This was a very stylised dramatisation of the life and heinous crimes of serial-killer John Reginald Christie who besides killing seven women, his wife included and almost certainly a baby girl (to which he never confessed, right to the end), also caused the execution of one of the victim's husband, the hapless Timothy Evans, who was given a Royal Pardon in 1966 some 16 years after his hanging. Stylised in that the filming itself is low-key and washed-out in appearance, while the direction makes use of slow-motion shots, unusual camera-angles and a strangely disembodied soundtrack of contemporary songs, most notably "Whispering Grass".Then there's Tim Roth's turn as Christie, where he reminds me of none so much as Leonard Rossiter's classic comedy creation of Rigsby, another sleazy landlord-type but with a less murderous bent. Roth speaks in a hissing whisper, walks with a shambling gait in his miles-too-big overcoat and hides his evil behind a pair of National Health spectacles. Almost everywhere he goes, creepy background music surrounds him. I also found it strange that each episode started with a scene after his arrests, such as the discovery of the bodies in his bricked-up kitchen, before abruptly stepping back in time to depict the lead-up to the murders.Interestingly, there are almost no graphic recreations of his killings, rare but welcome in modern TV and cinema, indeed there's no murder shown in episode one at all, plus we only start the story after he's killed his first two victims, before the doomed Evans family arrive as upstairs neighbours. As I indicated, Roth's mannered acting dominates proceedings, not completely to the production's advantage, but there is good support from Nico Mirallegro as Evans and Samantha Morton as Christie's long-suffering wife. The period reproduction is up to the BBC's usual high standard. However, I never really felt at any point that Roth's Christie was truly evil, for example, there are only the vaguest hints of his necrophilia and while I can imagine the difficulty in compressing eight murders into a three hour duration, can't help but feeling the concentration on the Evans murders detracts from the fact that the man was an evil serial killer as well as showing a disrespect for his previous victims. Arguably, the key murder was the first one, which set him on his grisly path, yet we get no real indication it ever happened and are thus given no real motive as to how this lecherous little man could be driven to his terrible crimes.Naturally, those of us with longer memories will compare this dramatisation with the excellent feature film from the 1970's starring Richard Attenborough, where I sensed the aura of evil much more than Roth emanates here. Perhaps that was partly due to effective casting against type, but in the end I felt that the depiction of Christie was misguided here and that this, plus the strained direction ultimately detracted from the dramatic impact of the piece as a whole.

While the acting of the principal actors is fine, especially Tim Roth. this mini-series just drags on and on. The way they have set up the narrative is odd and it just plods along. The story is mildly interesting because it was the mishandling of the case against Timothy Evans and his subsequent execution that eventually led to the abolition of the death penalty in the UK. The series is very dark and the ending is abrupt. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone despite the fact that it is from the BBC which has produced a lot of fine programming. Since this story has been told several times before, I am not sure why another telling was necessary.

One aspect of making a drama based on actual events is that we mostly know what's going to happen. This has the disadvantage of removing some of the apprehension needed to make good dramas work but it has the benefit of letting the viewer focus on other things.And in this case, there are plenty of 'other things' to absorb. The exquisite attention to detail on the sets, the (sometimes odd) writing, the inconsistent accents of some cast members and the masterful performances of Tim Roth and Samantha Morton.For some viewers (like me) it's worth re-familiarizing yourself with a little backstory about these characters and the events that happened, as they give some reason and motivation behind some of the strange decisions that are made.There is probably too little material for a three-hour miniseries to satisfy a young audience and the violence of the events that unfold are implied rather than displayed... which leaves the drama somewhat lacking in suspense... especially in a story where such inventive ways were used to dispatch the victims.In the end, this BBC drama is drab, uneventful and too long. What makes it even more difficult to digest are the choppy and confusing (and entirely unnecessary) flashbacks and flashforwards.