- Network: BritBox
- Series Premiere Date: Feb 17, 2025
Critic Reviews
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The entire show is rapidly paced and full of information, but the second half of “A Cruel Love” is the more compelling. .... Moving beyond Ruth, the series is even more riveting when it looks toward the societal standards of the time.
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As a period piece, it’s polished and beautifully shot, but as an agent of change, the jury is still out.
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The excellent lead, Lucy Boynton, is equal parts insolent charisma and wary vulnerability, a woman so accustomed to withstanding life’s hard knocks that she finds it difficult to let her guard down under any circumstances. If the story has a moral centre, it is provided by Toby Jones’s John Bickford. Jones is as superb as ever, albeit in the kind of role he’s perhaps in danger of finding himself stuck in for good.
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It’s a thought-provoking drama powered by a strong central performance from Lucy Boynton.
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All four episodes are available but the last is the most affecting. Particularly the scenes that show Ellis spending her final weeks in Holloway prison.
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While we wish there was a bit more of Ruth Ellis’ backstory at the beginning of A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, it’s still an intriguing story about the last woman executed in Great Britain, with a fine lead performance by Lucy Boynton.
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A Cruel Love is marred by crass melodrama. .... In later episodes, Boynton brings Ellis’s humanity and vulnerability to the fore (sitting in her cell doing jigsaws; nervously eating her last breakfast) and it’s very powerful.
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At times, A Cruel Love seems similarly hamstrung and never quite feels as if it gets to know Ellis. Perhaps that is the point. There are no clean lines.
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