A Little Thing Called Murder

"No body, no crime." That was the motto of Sante Kimes and her son Kenny, a mother and son team of con artists who ended up convicted of murder in the United States. 'A Little Thing Called Murder' tells their true story as a black comedy, a long way from the solemn tone of the usual Lifetime TV movie, with Judy Davis leading the cast.

Honolulu, 1981. Sante lives in luxury with Ken Kimes, a wealthy businessman who refuses to marry her. She doesn't need to steal, but she does it anyway: she pockets the salt shakers at restaurants, takes a convertible for a test drive that lasts a year and treats her maids as slaves. She's also been grooming Kenny to be her accomplice since he was a little boy.

As a teenager he seems to slip out of her grip, but Sante reels him back in and the two grow uncomfortably close. Together they move on to a string of property frauds and cons, each one riskier than the last, that takes them from Hawaii to New York with the police on their trail.

Davis, an Oscar nominee for 'A Passage to India' and 'Husbands and Wives', plays Sante, and Jonathan Jackson, later of 'Nashville', is Kenny. Chelcie Ross and Cynthia Stevenson also star, and a very young Alexander Ludwig plays Kenny at 11. Richard Benjamin, who made 'The Money Pit', directed from a script by Teena Booth based on the book 'Dead End' by reporter Jeanne King. Mary Tyler Moore had already played Kimes in a 2001 TV movie.

Lifetime premiered it on 23 January 2006. Davis won the Satellite Award for Best Actress in a TV film, the film took Best TV Film, and she was nominated for an Emmy. US critics mostly praised her performance, and the 4 outlets collected on Movienco give it an average of 7.3 out of 10.

• Comedy
• Drama