A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story; Get Millie Black

“A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story is a stylish four-parter that intends to tell the real story of Ruth’s turbulent life before she became famous as the last woman in England to be hanged. But it inevitably has to tread the line carefully between worthy drama and just another opportunity to rubberneck at the downfall of a woman already horribly exploited by the patriarchy, however much she sought to control what happened to her. On the whole, the programme succeeds.”
Julia Raeside, The i

“It’s a thought-provoking drama powered by a strong central performance from Lucy Boynton, who seems to offer little more than clipped tones and a gimlet glare in the early scenes but comes into her own in the final episode as the minutes tick by until the execution and Ellis tries to suppress her fear. Those last moments are a horror.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“Lucy Boynton has great presence and conveys Ellis’s detached, stunned insouciance after she shot Blakely outside a pub very convincingly. This is what’s so fascinating about Ellis. Even though she was beaten up and humiliated by Blakely, losing a baby when he punched her in the stomach, she kept a stiff upper lip.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“A Cruel Love is not really about murder and hanging. It’s about obsessive desire, and the consequences when it all goes wrong. Lucy Boynton is excellent as Ruth, but it’s Toby Jones as her solicitor, Mr Bickford, who gets the best lines.”
Roland White, Daily Mail

“The jury in Ellis’s trial took just 20 minutes to deliver their guilty verdict and condemn her to death. However, as this fine, empathetic drama shows, Ellis’s legacy was far from settled. In fact, it remains contested to this day.”
Phil Harrison, The Independent

“Touching on discrimination against LGBTQ+ Jamaicans, police corruption, people-smuggling and the echoes of colonialism that continue to ring out, it doesn’t exactly take a chipper ‘case of the week’ approach. Where it does slip into well-worn procedural territory, the excellent performances and general sense of unease seeping out of almost every scene keep it on track, in the same vein as True Detective and Mare of Easttown before it.”
Hannah J Davies, The Guardian

“This is the anti-Death in Paradise: there is sunshine but the mood is never feelgood and there is no neat tying-up of ends and few happy endings. It is complicated and very dark. Some of the violence is hideous, especially when a trans woman is battered to death with what look like baseball bats in a scene that is long and sickening. But Marlon James’s first television drama series is an impressive piece of work, avoiding most but not quite all cop show clichés.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“While a line or two pushes the script into on the nose territory, James’ writing is overwhelmingly smart and surprising. Coupled with stellar performances, especially from Tamara Lawrance and Chyna McQueen, Get Millie Black is as far from the bog-standard police procedural as Jamaica’s Kingston is from London.”
Emily Watkins, The i

“Get Millie Black is a drama to lean into. It doesn’t make its essence immediately obvious. Like James’s novels, it’s both earthy and dreamily allusive; fragments of meaning and memory snagged in your peripheral vision. So eventually, while this is a literal detective story, it’s also a figurative, emotional one – about identity, family, gender, self-image, and nationality. Even as the central mystery approaches some sort of resolution, the writing and performances, the perspectives and subjective points of view are compelling enough to leave these stories hanging alluringly.”
Phil Harrison, The Independent