Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Bele Torso It is what it is, a serviceable movie. In a motel and HBO plays the same movies all over. How many times can they play TED 2 or Michael Clayton? A Bourne flick is always on and then there is this movie.The real life drama of this escape was riveting. Like most prison breaks all the effort goes in how to get out without much reflection on what's next--these two criminals were no exception.If it weren't for these types of movies, how would C and B actors pay the bills? This venture gives a C actor the opportunity to star in a movie rather than get 10 mins of screen time on a bigger budget enterprise.This is definitely is a made for TV movie and smartly didn't try to be anything else. I wish they put more effort in the escape and played the drama up--it really would have been more entertaining. If this was not a true story it would have been cheesy but life can offer a slice of cheese. This woman did get seduced in a boring marriage watching her passionless life go by. Very real life reality for many.If you haven't seen the real life footage on YouTube of this crime break watch it--it is more entertaining than this movie but after you watch this interest is peaked. There is an hour long documentary that gets into the core details.

Jen This movie actually surprised me, after the last few lifetime biopics I saw I didn't have very high hopes for it. But the acting in this was great and they pretty much covered all the events that happened from beginning to end. If you like lifetime movies I would definitely check this out!

mgconlan-1 On April 23 Lifetime showed a movie they'd been heavily hyping for weeks: "New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell," based on a real-life New York prison escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility in June 2015. The escape, in which two convicts with the unfortunate names David Sweat (Joe Anderson) and Richard Matt (Myk Watford) broke out and had help doing so from two prison employees, Joyce Mitchell (Penelope Ann Miller) and Gene Palmer — and were at large for three weeks before Matt was shot down while threatening police with a shotgun and Sweat was taken alive two days later — made national news. Indeed, I can remember thinking when the story broke, "Someday this will be made into a Lifetime movie" — and now here it is. It's also quite well done, written and directed by Stephen Tolkin — who's done reality-based Lifetime movies before, including "The Craigslist Killer" and "Cleveland Abduction," and also has some feature-film credits — and vividly acted by the three principals as well as by Daniel Roebuck as Joyce's husband Lyle, a hapless guy with a penchant for boring her with conversational rambles. He's still turned on by her but she couldn't be less interested in him. Despite its rather clinical title, "New York Prison Break" works on just about every level, from the intrinsic interest of the story to the highly atmospheric direction Tolkin gives it, to the Hitchcockian game he plays throughout where he shows so much detail of how Sweat and Matt are literally digging their way out of the prison we end up rooting for them to succeed even though Tolkin tried to forestall that sort of moral reversal by beginning his film with a graphic depiction of the crime Sweat and Matt committed. Most prison-escape movies hedge their bets by making the prisoners sympathetic and the jailers the bad guys — either they're Nazis running a concentration camp or the authorities on Devil's Island or some such place lording it over unjustly convicted victims — but in this one the bad guys are bad guys, and yet through Tolkin's writing and direction and the appropriately edgy acting of Anderson and Watford they come off as just the sort of irresistible studs that might turn on a woman like Joyce Mitchell full of unfulfilled longings and desires. Penelope Ann Miller's performance as Joyce is also excellent, particularly when she switches from bored housewife and career woman to acting like a giddy teenager in the first throes of romantic passion when she gets notes from Sweat and contemplates a future with him on the outside — a dream of hers he, of course, has no intention of fulfilling! "New York Prison Break" is obviously an exploitation film aimed at taking advantage of the publicity surrounding the real event, and yet it's also a finely honed piece of drama — not a great film by any means, but a solidly appealing one that manages to offer quality entertainment and is particularly good at dramatizing the frustration that leads Joyce Mitchell to her fatal infatuation with Sweat and Matt. Where Tolkin scores best is in the clashes between the three main characters — Mitchell the mature woman (it's established that she's already a grandmother) who's acting like a giddy teenager; Matt the confident seducer who's able to get what he wants with his gifts as an artist (he paints quite a few pictures, including ones of Mitchell and other prison staffers which he trades for favors) and a lover; and Sweat the callous but hunky brute who's willing to exploit not only Joyce but Matt as well.In one of the film's most chilling scene, after the two have broken out together, Sweat dumps Matt and tells him that now that his plans have changed and they're fleeing to Canada instead of Mexico, he won't need Matt because the only reason he included Matt was that Matt spoke Spanish and he doesn't have to have a Spanish-speaker on board if he's going to Canada instead. "New York Prison Break" is the sort of quirky delight that keeps us unlikely Lifetime buffs watching this often exploitative (particularly in their "reality" series, less so in their movies) but also often oddly compelling network.

sandoval_kat I've watched some pretty awful movies on Lifetime, and although this was based on a true story, I could not even watch the entire movie. I know Miss Miller studied Joyce in order to portray her to the best of her ability and for accuracy, but Joyce is THE most pathetic woman I've ever seen and her weakness was so annoying that I skipped out on the last 40 minutes. We all know the ending, so no need wasting valuable time on such drivel.