Movie: The Tenth Circle (Lifetime)
Premiere Date: Saturday, June 28th, 2008
Rating: 1 out of 4 Stars

Quick Synopsis: Painful, prodding and predictable

Long Synopsis: The story of local college professor, her comic book artist husband and their 15-year-old daughter. When the daughter accuses her boyfriend of rape, their world gets turned upside down. Everyone thinks she is lying and then everyone thinks he did it and then it looks like he committed suicide. The detective looking into the rape begins investigating a possible murder/suicide. As the story continues, you find out what really happened. Was there a rape? Was it suicide or murder? Who did or didn’t do anything?

Review: The Tenth Circle is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Jodi Picoult. It stars Kelly Preston (Death Sentence), Ron Eldard (Blind Justice) and Britt Robertson (Swingtown).

The movie has a weird flow to it. It just plods along and a third of the way in, I had no idea what the point of it was, as I hadn’t read the book or anything about the story before watching the screener.

It opens like it is another family drama, but then not everything is revealed, as scenes stop before you get to see everything. So, it turns into a sort of whodunit mystery. It tries to go back and forth between the two and doesn’t do either all that well.

The very end shows you what you didn’t get to see earlier to fill in the gaps and reveal what has gone on. But, you will probably know long before they show you.

Overall, The Tenth Cirlce is not one of Lifetime’s better movies. It may have been a bestselling novel, but it didn’t translate into a very good TV movie, as did happen with last months very good The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

The Tenth Circle premieres tonight on Lifetime and replays tomorrow night, June 29th and again on Monday night, June 30th.

Photo: CR Chris Reardon / Lifetime