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Best movie of this year hands down!

People are voting emotionally.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

I would vote lower and say that this was awful- however the acting and much of the production was excellent. Where this effort goes off track with me is the title Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution. It may have been based on or inspired by - but it is defiantly not her story. Miss Christie's story focused on the mystery surrounding the truth about whether or not a man had committed murder and just exactly who was telling the truth. This production focuses on a solicitor grieving the death of his son and how because of that grief he deluded himself into believing lies on all fronts. His delusions result in the freeing of the guilty the death of the innocent and even to his own suicide. This is a completely different story. Not a bad story but certainly one that did not require the complete bastardization of Miss Christie's original work to tell. Any effort that could have been made by the BBC to not delude the audience that this is Miss Christie's story would have been a help to this story - but the BBC chose not to make any effort in order to capitalize on the Christie name and draw an audience. Shame on the BBC. Badly done.

I don't need police brutality lecture when I am watching an Agatha Christie mystery. For one thing, my sympathy is firmly with police of American and all European countries, who are good enough to keep on protecting us, even as rampant immigration makes our cities more dangerous. So I didn't appreciate the thinly veiled dig at the police. The BBC really needs to be aware that not all viewers are liberals, a fact that has escaped them. Perhaps they should leave entertainment as entertainment. I also didn't particularly appreciate the swearing. It seemed forced and out of place. Don't get me wrong, I don't object to foul language on principle. I only disliked it here because it was so obviously an attempt to set themselves apart from ITV Chritie by being more "modern" except that it wasn't. It was just more childish. Aside from that, i actually fell asleep during the first episode. It was all talk, talk, talk. the camera didn't even move. The characters were not that dynamic, and they were not that deep. it wasn't terrible, but I can't say i enjoyed the show. And can people PLEASE STOP SAYING THAT THIS IS "REALISTIC"! Just because they are coughing in bed doesn't add realism. Considering how completely stupid the answer to the mystery turned out, based on an absurd, and impossible coincidence, I would say this is a hundred times less realistic then the original Agatha Chritie story. I have never seen the other movie of this show, so i am not comparing it to anything, but I think this was completely rotten. The writer needs to get the political correctness bug out, and stop trying so hard to make the shows dreary. The ITV version of Agatha Christie was often dark, and some episodes left me crying ( Five Little Pigs) because the end was so bittersweet. It was still excellent. I am not expecting a "delicious fun murder". I don't even like that. But this is terrible. And it is the furthest thing from realistic.

This is probably the worst BBC drama I have seen on the BBC and the BBC should think carefully about relying on the team responsible in the future. The story was thin, obvious and full of holes, it might have filled a 15 min short story but stretching it to 2 hrs was just excruciating. The coincidence at the end where the key protagonists all end up in the same holiday resort is just unbelievable from the story sense and the viewers credibility. I am not criticising the actors who all played the parts they were given well, and the production was good as one would expect from the BBC.

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.