I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Simply Perfect

One of my all time favorites.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

All the Jesse Stone movies are very well written and acted. Only one inconsistency I found in the screen play for this one. When Rose Gamon (Kathy Baker) visits and questions the neighbor of the suspected child kidnapper, they talk in detail about the suspected woman. While the long-time neighbor seems to know all about the woman and the so-called birth of her child, she fails to mention that the child was killed in an unfortunate, accident. When Jesse and Rose finally confront the kidnapper, she shows them a newspaper article she has kept about the accident and the child's death. Obviously, this would have known to the neighbor, but she never mentions it to Rose. Am I wrong? Did I miss something? Only flaw in an otherwise excellent movie with a steller cast.

Watching this latest Jesse Stone film Thin Ice put me in mind of Murder She Wrote and Jessica Fletcher's little hamlet by the sea Cabot Cove. The similarities between Cabot Cove and Paradise are striking, but the attitudes are certainly different among the residents.As usual there are two cases for the small town police force to solve in this film. It opens with Tom Selleck and his friend Stephen McHattie from the State Police on a most unofficial stakeout when both are shot. Selleck manages to get off some shots and may have wounded one of the two shooters. The second is Camryn Manheim who came in from New Mexico. Her day old infant was snatched from the hospital several years ago. Mother's intuition and a strange letter tell her that her kid is in Paradise. On that very thin evidence and on her women's intuition Kathy Baker investigates with silent approval from Selleck. By the way Manheim's one scene with Selleck and Baker is unbelievably moving.But it was the side issue that grabbed me. The town council is having a hissy fit over Selleck doing a little moonlighting with McHattie. His chief critic on the council Jeremy Akerman who after unsuccessfully trying to get Selleck to hire his nephew makes it clear that his chief function as police is to nail those speeders at the local trap and generate some revenue. Selleck who worked homicide in the LAPD really thinks it beneath him. Not to mention that those murders from previous Jesse Stone stories are giving Paradise a bad name which could affect the tourist trade.Contrast that with Cabot Cove and how they treat Jessica Fletcher and think of all the murders she solved in Murder She Wrote's long run. The residents there certainly never thought of firing Tom Bosley or Ron Masak and certainly weren't about to tar and feather their most famous resident. Cabot Cove in fact had to be the murder capital of the United States. Paradise has a long way to go.I think it's the provincial attitudes of some of the people you will take away when you watch Thin Ice.

In addition to the problems stated in previous reviews, some of the dialog seems stripped (in its exact form) from previous episodes. Old characters that once provided meaning and added to mood now just seem like familiar on-screen forms. What was spare and inviting the first time around just seems lazy now. I think what is missing is a compelling story.And I really miss Molly.I like the characters and the setting so much that I was willing to watch Thin Ice but I would not have been encouraged to watch other episodes had this been my first contact with the series.

Tom Selleck's fifth go round as Robert B Parker's Jesse Stone, the emotionally wounded chief of police for Paradise Massachusetts a small hamlet not far from Boston. Sharing many of the same characters as the Spencer novels the stories and the films have a nice familiar feel while having their own unique style. This is the first film not to be based upon a Parker novel, though to be perfectly honest I think it would fit in nicely with the books.Stone, forever pining for his ex-wife is at the end of the road and perhaps as the story begins the end of his rope. One of the town fathers has it in for Stone because he's not playing ball. he is not using his men to write lucrative speeding tickets (and he's removed the best ticket writer the town had) nor is he willing to hire the man's son in law. The main thrust of the film is that Stone was involved in a shooting that left the head of the state police homicide squad, Captain Healy, (a cross over character from the Spencer novels) struggling for his life. Healy is a good friend of Stone's and he is not going to let the shooting rest, "because I got shot as well". From this shooting comes further complications as Stone becomes involved with an internal affairs cop investigating the shooting. Add to the mix there is also the appearance of a woman from New Mexico who is looking for her son who was abducted seven years earlier while still an infant and whom she believes maybe in Paradise.There is much going on and yet at times not a great deal since the film seems more interested in getting into the head of Selleck's Jesse Stone. A man of few words Stone says little preferring his actions to say more than his words. He is a very moral man (his battle with the town council makes that clear) adrift in a world with out morality.I know on some level I would have liked more details to the mysteries at hand, but at the same time I like that the film is a character driven tale. I like that you have to watch the film (and the other Stone films) because what is important isn't what is being said, its whats being done and what is happening between the words. There is a really good scene late in the film when Stone, knowing he is being watched, goes through a pantomime with one of his officers. What is being said runs at odds at how things look, it is something that sums up how the Stone films work.They draw you in and make you care because in order for them to work you have to pay attention to what the characters really are saying and doing.I liked the film a great deal. If you are a Jesse Stone fan you will like this as well. If you've not seen one before I think you'd like it as well. I'm sure, that you'll be like me and it will have you looking forward to the next one, due late in 2009.