Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Had it been an original story, not based on an Agatha Christie novel, I would rate it 10/10. It's a beautifully executed drama of a man who loses everything with a top performance by Toby Jones. It's well written, well acted and follows the highly popular although slightly annoying slow-cinema-inspired pace (plus adequately blurry vision that sometimes is really troubling because you can't see what's actually happening on sreen, but hey - that's what critics love, don't they?).Sadly, the film also follows a now already well domesticated trend on television to mix Agatha Christie with kitchen-sink drama. This means you can't watch Agatha Christie with entire family anymore because you get at least two sex scenes and some explicit language (the sex scene between John Mayhew, the leading character, and his wife is particularly kitchen-sink, and pretty awful to be honest). Now, why on earth do such a thing? Christie created a unique universe of her own, a world that never was but was ideally escapistic and therefore we'd immediately embraced it. Why not follow the pattern so many love and expect? There's place for both - I love a good Mike Leigh drama as much as I love classic Christie, but not when the two are mixed. Will we every get an old school Christie again? I hope so, a very much hope so.

Here's a little test that will help you decide whether to watch this flick or not.Say you're a screenwriter. One night you lie awake in bed thinking about the classic film 'Witness for the Prosecution' with the plot by Agatha Christie, starring Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Elsa Lanchester and John Williams — and of course directed by Billy Wilder. You are thinking something was missing from that film, but you can't figure out what it was. Then it hits you: SEX. And not just sex, but sex and degradation. That's the ticket! A remake with more sex and degradation. That's what the world needs now. So the next day you wake up and you make this film. Was this a good idea, or a bad idea?If the correct answer is not obvious to you, there's a chance that you'll enjoy this movie.

Can definitely see the polarising opinions, the virtues being brought up are understandable and every bit as understandable are the complaints.Of the adaptations of 'Witness for the Prosecution' it is this 2016 adaptation that fares the weakest, despite being closer to the short story than the play it is not a patch on the brilliant 1957 Billy Wilder film. Also preferred the 1982 version. It is not awful, and there are worse Agatha Christie adaptations around, a most notable recent example being 'Partners in Crime' with a woefully miscast David Walliams. But after being so impressed by 2015's 'And Then There Were None', I was honestly expecting much more.There are strong things here. Apart from going overboard on the grimness sometimes, particularly in the first half, 'Witness for the Prosecution' is very pleasing to look at, being beautifully shot and with costume and set design that are both handsome and evocative. The music is unobtrusive but still has a presence.Parts of the storytelling are very compelling, the whodunit and legal stuff is mostly quite riveting, while the conflict of WWI is powerfully evoked and the relationship between Mayhew and his wife having moments of tender pathos. There are some great twists, especially the very clever (though the one of the 1957 film had more edge) final reveal.'Witness for the Prosecution' benefits from a great cast as well. A brilliant performance from Toby Jones is particularly note-worthy, and more than up to his level are Andrea Riseborough, who captivates in bringing an enigmatic quality to a character that you are not sure whether to trust or not. Billy Howle's performance is enough to make one convinced of his innocence. David Haig and Tim McMullan excel as morally devious barristers, as does a venomous Monica Dolan and a touchingly subtle Hayley Carmichael. Kim Catrall is luxury casting, and is a dream.It is a real shame however that 'Witness for the Prosecution' is let down significantly by pacing issues, especially for a lot of the first half, which takes too long to set up with scenes that feel over-stretched and go on longer than needed, and the seemingly endless and melodramatic stuff after the final reveal, like there was an indecisiveness as to how to end it. The second half is more gripping and better paced, but again the pace does drag and scenes and subplots feel like padded filler.Really it would have been better to do 'Witness for the Prosecution' as a one off lasting an hour or something, because the story just doesn't feel long enough to sustain two hour long episodes. So it felt like there was too much padding and stretching in an attempt to sustain it. There is stuff included to give the story a darker tone, but it did feel too often too gratuitously grim and anachronistic, and over-darkened and overshadowed a story that didn't need it.A few scenes between Mayhew and his wife, despite some tender pathos in others and great chemistry between Jones and Carmichael, felt soapy and overwritten, and personally am another person who found the sex scene unnecessary and in poor taste.Concluding this review, not an awful adaptation and production, not as bad as said by some, but could have been much better and comes off as uneven. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Although difficult, I approached this BBC version of the story by trying to put the Billy Wilder one as far from my mind as possible. Of course that is not easy, and it is obvious from the get-go that this version is much different from the 1950's film of the same name. The way it comes through is very much in the grittiness and darkness of this version; there is no comedy lawyer, no light tone to draw you in – from the start it is a sordid relationship, a dirty piece of rough, stinking jail cells, and a lawyer servicing deadbeats for minimum wage. To be fair, maybe this is what it took to shake off the Wilder memory, because it is very dark throughout.In some ways this is a bad thing, but not many. The strength of this approach becomes clearer as the second part plays out (and this does play better with them back-to-back). The dark tone of everything is paid off with a tremendously impacting ending which not only hits the main mystery, but gives revelation and resolution to the main character too (okay based on an absurd coincidence, but I forgave it that). This had the added advantage of giving something for the viewer who already thought they knew it all, as well as justifying how dark everything had been up until that point. And it had been dark. Indeed, the first episode was almost tiresomely so – I found it to be a real drag as everything seemed aimed at showing how awful everything was. Like I said, this is justified in the end, but I still think it was laid on a bit heavy.In all areas this is the case, but the cinematography is the main one; it looks so murky to the point where it feels like the DOP slapped on an Instagram filter. It felt so heavy handed in this way that it did turn me off a little – and it seemed to highlight how hard everything else was trying to be down and dirty too. Jones' performance is the same in some ways; it works in the entirety, but for a while he feels like he is just playing to the lowest point in a deliberate way. He is still very good though, and the rest of the cast match him, with good turns from Riseborough, Howle, Cattrall, and Dolan (who has the darkest moments with her "not today thank you" denials). As a fan of Utopia, Ready was a surprise find in a small role.Overall this version initially seems to be overcompensating with its darkness at first, but in the end it is more than justified and works really well, even if it makes that first hour a bit harder to get through than it needed to be.