evening1 Imagine a world in which you can't trust anyone but your mother and NOTHING is as it appears.Such is the setting for "The Preacher's Mistress," which was pretty bad, but not so bad that I didn't want to see it through to its conclusion.It is extremely formulaic in that, if you're experienced with Lifetime movies, you can see the plot twists from a mile away. From the moment we see that Gwen has a flat and the preacher materializes from nowhere to fix it, we know exactly where this nihilistic story is heading.The movie treats the viewer like a fool, virtually underlining, underscoring, and adding exclamation points to help us grasp that Sidney isn't the insightful friend she appears but rather a cunning fiend. I have to admit I liked the performance of Sarah Lancaster. She does well in the entirely believable position of a woman who trusts the charming guy she goes to bed with. (Is there a woman out there who doesn't identify?) I agree with a previous reviewer that the movie ends on a saccharine note, tying everything up in a bow that turns the dystopia of this film into a fairy-tale fantasy. Er, OK.

alannasser The first ten minutes of this movie lead you to expect another very poor Lifetime movie - sluggish pace, wooden acting and embarrassing dialog. But things soon take a felicitous turn and the film ends up worth watching, notably better than standard Lifetime fare. Remember now, it's a Lifetime movie and certain heights will not be attained. That said, the plot turns out to be more layered than you might expect - usually it's a heroine and a bad guy, two characters interacting in a manner supposed to generate tension and thrills. Here we have 5 or 6 characters interwoven in a way that keeps your interest. The female lead's performance improves after the first 10 minutes and Natalia Cigliuti, playing a central character, proves herself to be a first rate actor (not actress - why call a female actor an "actress"?), far superior to the rest of the cast here. I was quite surprised to find myself fully engaged with the story. The other reviewers are right: the ending is a total bust - trite, unimaginative, implausible - as if the writer couldn't come up with a conclusion as interesting as the plot. As usual, the heroine cannot be left without a romantic prospect in Lifetime, so the story had to written with a character who could perform that function in the final seconds of the movie.

tedphx This movie is a delightful addition to my favorite Lifetime category which I lovingly call "Get The Bitch." It's when the lead actress finally does something so stupid that you're compelled to start rooting for the villain. This time it's when our lonely lovely is distraught enough to confront her bad-beau at his church - an idea so terrible that she then deserves everything that happens afterward - as well as before.To be clear, this movie was quite enjoyable overall as a good many of the movies in the "genre" are. A woman with a young boy becomes a damsel in slight distress and is befriended by a a man who, quite naturally, becomes her boyfriend. Of course, nothing is what it seems to her, even though we know exactly what's happening. If the title itself doesn't offer enough of a clue, "The Preacher's Mistress" is soon over her head with enough problems to last a lifetime - possibly quite literally.But while her naiveté and stupidity are actually very believable, the ending isn't, and as a viewer, that's distressing because the final scene of endangerment could have easily been done, say, as an attempt to stage suicide, with our poor mistress being saved in a nick of time by the private investigator her mother had hired to follow the no-good boyfriend.Instead, we got a preposterous denouement in which the investigator had to be idiotic enough, not to mention close enough, to allow it all to happen before our drugged heroine saves both herself and P.I. guy. Then, throw in an instant romance and roll credits.

herbqedi As Sidney, Gwen's best friend, Natalia Cigulari is absolutely devastating and totally credible until the film's ridiculous denouement. Eleese Lester, a native Texan, in this Houston-based story, is excellent as the mother our heroine thinks is too controlling but is actually the only thing between her and "Texas Justice." On the other hand, our heroine Gwen, portrayed by dewy-eyed Sarah Lancaster, seems to be reading her lines from a teleprompter. And that's just one of this film's many problems. The direction is so heavy-handed and the musical cues remove a lot of the tension from a plot that actually is well above-average in its innate craftiness and set-up of the situation. That's why I even bothered to write this one up. The film's "book" deserves remaking and Ms. Cigulari and Ms. Lester were perfect in their roles. Most of the rest of the cast was at least serviceable with the actress playing the police detective being better than that. The actor playing the other villain, the married Preacher,who pretends to be an unmarried pharmaceutical sales executive who sweeps Gwen off her feet as part of the nefarious plan, is quite good and well cast as well. But the heavy handed direction uses sinister music and then shows us too soon that Sidney is not who she seems to be. This could have been almost a Hitchcockian thriller if we didn't find this out until the climax and if we did not have a director who would be third choice for a third-rate soap opera episode. And as others have said, in the last 15 minutes the villains take all their clever plotting and perfect frame and throw it straight out the window so our heroine can escape. So what could've been a thriller to rival Dial M for Murder ends in characters behaving in a way totally foreign to everything they had done until now and turning our clueless and drugged heroine into a resourceful action hero. Too bad.