Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy

Whatever the complaints about the movie, it brings home, as few films on such themes ever do, the terrors of accusation and conviction.

After watching the movie, I may not have actually changed my mind about her innocence--but for the first time, I sure have doubts.

Panettiere takes a tricky role and does it, at least, some justice.

This ethically debatable movie depicts her as a brat abroad, enjoying sex and drugs with her boyfriend, and implies Knox (who is appealing her conviction) did the deed.

It's an extended "Law & Order" that never settles on a verdict.

Ultimately, though, Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy isn't as sensational as it might have been. It unfolds without too much of the lurid caricature of so many other Lifetime movies.

If anything, it moves so tentatively through the baffling investigation and trial that Hayden Panettiere seems to play a dozen Amandas: cheerful, furtive, erratic--and at times literally clueless. [28 Feb 2011, p.40]