Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

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

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

gayanna So surprised at the negative reviews, but certainly art is always a matter of personal taste. I found the story beautifully done, loved the characters and appreciated the various ways the title was interpreted in the intersecting storylines. I truly enjoyed everything about this film.

lizlie2001 Spoilers: Your husband dresses like a young boy, builds forts in the woods and you blithely look out your window and ring a bell when supper is ready??? Your child disappears and you don't contact your wife immediately but wait until you're driven home by the police?? You apparently don't work but can afford an huge upscale flat or are we supposed to believe a children's book writer in this day and age can live off royalties??? Or an apparently friendless woman teaching a few hours a week and giving piano lessons can afford a killer stand alone cottage on a large Kent property?. Oh dear. I am someone who cries over diaper commercials but nothing in this contrived out of touch melodrama touched me in any way. Each character was an upper class white Brit - devoid of passion. Everyone said their lines appropriately but what was happening underneath?? Nothing. I kept on hoping it would get better. It didn't. When it ended in a barren hospital room with no monitoring equipment and a woman valiantly giving birth without aid of drugs, I wondered if this script had been written in the '50

jc-osms What a strange TV film this was and I have to say I didn't get it at all. The big story was the abduction of a well-connected London couple's four year old daughter whilst out shopping with her father, played hand-wringingly seriously by Benedict Cumberbatch. There's never any doubt at all that she will ever be found and so the piece becomes an extended study in grief and loss and its effect on the relationship between the parents. But there's another altogether stranger story intermixed into the plot as Cumberbatch's best friend and publisher, the Prime Minister's spin doctor, approaching burn-out, gives up his city and Westminster life to retreat with his devoted wife to the country but where instead of recharging his batteries he regresses to his childhood on his way to a nervous breakdown and beyond.I just wasn't convinced by any of it. Cumberbatch and his wife, played by Kelly MacDonald separate after their daughter's disappearance but in their first meeting in months inevitably end up in bed. Both of them seem to have visions of children in their midst, culminating in Cumberbatch's big breakdown scene when he mistakes a young schoolgirl for his Katie and finally realises in the process that she's never coming back.There are a number of peripheral characters who flit in and out of the narrative like the female teacher who befriends Cumberbatch while they attend a Commons Committee on children's education and his mother who witters on about imagining her unborn son being present at a small-town bar before she'd even conceived him.There's plenty more of that kind of weirdness, like the suspicious behaviour of the Prime Minister and Home Secretary over their aide's dropping out, said aide's running about the countryside in short trousers like he's on "The Coral Island", Cumberbatch's aforementioned teacher friend who cuts her head en route to his house and nosily discovers his untouched "shrine" to his absent daughter...I wasn't convinced by the situations portrayed or the back and forth treatment of time which I found tricksy and confusing. As for the performances, you could literally see Cumberbatch and McDonald acting and not very impressively at that, while in the writing, I found nothing credible in what was depicted with the dialogue falling unnaturally from everyone's lips.And as for the restorative, I won't go quite so far as to say happy, ending, it's entirely predictable and wholly unconvincing.I don't know, maybe it was adapted from one of those impossible-to-dramatise modern novels, I hear about. All I know is that I wasn't moved or touched by anything I saw in this production and frequently looked away from the screen in embarrassment at the gaucheness I was witnessing.

ianlouisiana to wring their hands to and "Cumberbitches" to weep over. This is a deadly serious subject reduced to a sub - Pinteresque exercise in clever - cleverness with stilted dialogue and performances straight from "The Serious Actors Guide to Populist Telly". Our hero(the never knowingly underacted Mr B.Cumberbatch) loses his daughter in a Supermarket(one can imagine what fun Lady Bracknell would have had with that)and,as often happens in real life ,his marriage falls apart.Hang on to that thought - the one about real - life because it's the only brush with it that "The child in time" has. We have smug upper middle class parents and their smug upper middle class chums,equally smug grandparents all terribly stiff upper lip when a good old - fashioned ruck would do them all a world of good but of course they are all so frightfully well brought up and stiff necked that there is no possibility of anything but terribly civilised behaviour except from Mr Cumberbatch's best chum who reverts to being a very keen boy scout and goes to live in the woods at the back of his terrible nice house before hanging himself ,possibly unable to get over his crush on Brown Owl. Cue for Mr Cumberbatch's lip to quiver as he delivers a funeral eulogy. I won't reveal the ending but it signals itself like the arrival of the 6.45 Virgin Intercity 125 from Manchester Piccadilly. By then I'd quite forgotten the poor little mite who had gone missing in the first reel.