ChikPapa Very disappointed :(

Blucher One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Forumrxes Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Monkeywess This is an astonishing documentary that will wring your heart while it bends your mind

monesque Yawn, a period piece and a serial killer. Yet, this enchanting miniseries takes that simple concept, freshens it up and makes it all special. The acting is great, the pacing and the writing are excellent, and the plot (where these things most often fail) works, too. There is also a touch of social commentary, which is well taken and happily more obvious from circumstances than preachy speeches. This clever program is one of the best things of its type that I have seen in a long, long while. Don't miss it.

dan.adams Pretty unrealistic murder mystery. Reminiscent of the "famous five" The feminist card is played to early and to long. The dimwittedness of males is a cross the girls must carry. Mind you the principal lady,Susan,has incredible difficulty conveying the simplest bit of information to anyone else.Sighs and heaving bosoms convey little to the average chap. The story itself is incredible.Things become unbelievably(Meldrew,not me) out of control in the last episode. Hope we see no more of these 1940 anoraks. My feeling is,the Bletchley Circle would have been more gainfully engaged in confidence tricking.Either bringing scammers to boot with their code breaking talents or perhaps,chiseling "not very deserving outfits", themselves.And getting away with it of course.A bit the way Alistair Sim or Sir Alec tended to do things.......

celr The genre of the amateur detective is old and shopworn. In the hands of the masters like Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers it can be brilliant, as long as we accept the formal quaint convention that a little old lady or an English lord might go around solving murders that baffle the police. In Bletchley Circle instead of one amateur sleuth we get four: a committee of nerdy women who, having worked at code-breaking in WWII, now have not much to do and nothing to challenge their superior minds. In fact, almost the entire first episode is spent having one of the ladies trying to convince the other three to join the hunt for a vicious serial killer. But even the four together don't add up to one Miss Marple or Peter Whimsey. They're supposed to be super smart and great at putting together clues from reading newspapers and other evidence they collect, but at the same time they're clueless, bumbling and squeamish. One nearly gets herself raped trying to bait the killer and they commit various obvious offenses by contaminating crime scenes and stealing evidence. No wonder the police regard them with suspicion. Though they uncover leads through careful analysis, how they arrive at their conclusions is summarized so quickly and sketchily that the audience has no idea how the pieces were put together. In detective fiction the reader (or viewer) is supposed to have some idea of the steps that lead to the solution of the case. In this we are just told the women are doing some heavy thinking and then come out with a result.Another very annoying feature is the heavy feminist bias that muddies the plot. Not counting the killer, most all the men in this series are either fools or abusers. This is retro feminism from the 1980s superimposed on a postwar story. One girl's husband notices that she's absent from the home at odd hours and improbably accepts her strange behavior without explanation. Another woman's husband beats her up, a digression which adds to the theme that men are beasts and annoyingly delays the unfolding of the plot. Grotesque and creepy details of the killer's M.O. seemed purely gratuitous to me detracting from the excitement of the hunt. The mystery-thriller is an old standby and needs new elements to keep it fresh, but remember that gifted amateurs going around solving crimes is a literary convention that requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

ceri-edwards2 A group of women who worked at Bletchley during the war return to their undervalued prewar existences until one of them happens upon a line of enquiry regarding a spate of murders of young women. She finds old colleagues from the Bletchley years and they form the eponymous circle to crack the code of the killings. Not believed and told to back down by all men in their lives and the authorities they fight alone to attempt to solve some pretty gruesome murders. The writing is excellent and the portrayals by. Each of the four women leads is rounded, true and touching in their different ways. The only thing I would change is the over egged references to the murder being solved as a code: it was as if the writers felt it was a bit of a stretch and so had to 'explain' it all the time and thus made this one aspect a little clumsy and difficult to sustain suspension of disbelief. A good look at the roles and struggles of women of the period but based on the murder mystery pace and style it is not preachy but accessible and exciting.There have been plenty of hinted at back story lines and there is lots of room for growth and new story lines in a second series - she says with fingers crossed and a begging nod to The makers/funders