AllMovie

A gloriously atypical Lifetime TV movie, this true-crime biopic gives master thespian Judy Davis another chance (following The Reagans and Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows) to overpower the small screen and go more than a little over the top. Davis' Sante Kimes is an amoral, delightfully tawdry monster who enslaves the help, enlists the criminal assistance of her school-aged son, and browbeats her common-law husband into enduring no end of bad behavior. That she's also a fraud, a thief, and eventually a conscience-free murderess -- well, at least she's true to character, and what a character she is. It would be unfair to say that Davis chews the scenery, for really, the entire film is just a platform for her ferocious performance. It's a testament to her chops that she makes such a true-life nightmare so much guilty fun to watch. By abandoning the moralistic, deadly serious tone of many such movies, director Richard Benjamin and screenwriters Randy Stone and Teena Booth inject A Little Thing Called Murder with a stylistic freshness more typical of smart indies than movies of the week. Glib, mean-spirited, and vicious in the best possible way, A Little Thing Called Murder serves as a corrective to all those other, overwrought docudramas.