Protraph
Lack of good storyline.
Kailansorac
Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
Humbersi
The first must-see film of the year.
Michael Ledo
Two young misfit girls take a crying baby, care for it, and then kill it. After spending seven years in prison, they are back in the neighborhood. Alice (Danielle Macdonald) is the stronger personality of the two. She is overweight with self-esteem issues. Her mom (Diane Lane) is best friends with other girl, Ronnie (Dakota Fanning) who is quiet and reserved. She seems to have a messed up family life, but that is not developed. It isn't long before another girl goes missing, and the two girls become suspects. Elizabeth Banks plays the detective investigating the case. She was also the officer who found the dead child seven years ago.The film includes smartly placed flashbacks. There are also excellent clues, things and dialogue that have no meaning until you know the ending. The plot keeps you engaged as the pieces to the puzzle fall in place.Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.
Peter Pluymers
"Do you ever wonder what would have happened if maybe you had found the baby sooner? Maybe you could have saved her. Maybe if you had walked just a little bit faster, she would still be alive. Did you ever think about that?""Every Secret Thing" is a meager attempt to create a thriller full of suspense. The inspiration came from a book written by Laura Lippman. Usually a story about missing children makes you feel uncomfortable and tells about the most terrible thing that can happen to you as a parent. However, I would recommend to watch "Prisoners" starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman. In terms of suspense and showing the desperation of the frightened parents, this film transcends effortlessly this shallow attempt. The two teenagers Alice (Danielle Macdonald) and Ronnie (Dakota Fanning) aren't really creepy or frighteningly. On the contrary. You feel sorry for these two misfits who, by circumstances, made a wrong decision when they were young. Even though it turns out that one of them has a morbid, gloomy mind.At the age of 11, the two young girls decide to take a baby, sitting in an abandoned stroller on a porch, with them (and she's also a granddaughter of the first black judge in the community), after they attended a disastrous birthday party. The two are not exactly popular with kids of the same age. Alice is a chubby girl and Ronnie is an introverted child who also happens to have a sharp tongue. At first it was just a harmless game for those two teenagers. But later on they started to realize they couldn't cope with it and there was no turning back. The total lack of necessary care was fatal for the baby. The two were brought to justice and convicted for kidnapping and murdering a child. You don't need to be a brilliant mind to know who they'll suspect again when another baby disappears in the same community.I thought this movie failed in several areas. This film is mostly supported by women (several female actors, a female director, a female script writer and writer). This is noticeable since the result is quite soft. Nancy Porter (Elizabeth Banks), a female detective who's like a sort of adult version of Nancy Drew, is motivated enough to solve this mystery. She discovered in a haphazard way the corpse of the first victim and was subsequently promoted. And she's determined to find this baby again. Although I had a feeling as if there was no rush. She looked rather stoical. You can say that Alice's mother does some groundbreaking work as an art teacher, but she fails completely as a parent. Alice was in a certain way kind of creepy. And yet that split personality isn't displayed explicitly. Her sophisticated and manipulative traits were acted outstanding. However, the acting wasn't that convincing at the denouement. In other words, the whole movie lacked some true tension.The only one who could captivate me with her acting, was Fanning (The last time I saw her acting was in "War of the Worlds" as a very young girl). A superb personage with a complicated character. An introverted girl who's, despite her depressive and alternative appearance, still extremely attractive. For me she was also the only credible character.Even the strange twists at the end can't avoid this melodramatic thriller ending up at the same level as most average TV movies. The mysterious beginning, the shocking subject and the sometimes superb acting eventually couldn't prevent it to become a clichéd thriller with no real surprises. And the final scene is the most clichéd ending ever made. More reviews here : http://bit.ly/1KIdQMT
jtindahouse
This is an interesting little film. It's a dark story full of grim characters, most of the which are the type you hope never enter your life. You could call this film predictable (and it is to be fair) but I don't think that's where the strength of this film was ever supposed to lie. The strength lies in just how interesting the characters are. The mystery of just how evil each of them potentially is just adds to things.For an under-the-radar film it has a pretty strong cast. Diane Lane, Elizabeth Banks and Dakota Fanning all turn in strong performances and the lesser known actors do a good job as well. It's also well directed and despite there being almost no action scenes during the 90 minute run time, the film never drags which is always a good sign. Altogether it's a fine little film that I hope a lot more people get the chance to see.
lor_
Plot gimmicks are all the rage in TV and movies today - twists and explanations once reserved for "immoral" (or properly amoral) roadshow exploitation films in the '30s and '40s (when there was a Production Code limiting mainstream cinema content) are now commonplace.These crutches to fool or confuse an audience in the quest for a "surprise" ending (or series of anticlimactic endings) sink the promising film EVERY SECRET THING, a title which heralds the use of several deus ex machina gimmicks that masters of suspense and mystery like Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie would have blue penciled away before publication.Another warning was opening credit Starz Digital Media, implying this movie is not a film but rather what we used to call a TV movie back in the day before ancillary media morphed into primary outlets. Noted in IMDb as a pet project for actress turned producer Frances McDormand, I will not quibble with its fine intentions, only with the lousy execution.Structurally film gets off to a rocky start with a prologue that features "3 days earlier" card (cuing first of perhaps 50 flashbacks, some useful, many extraneous storytelling crutches), and then the key events setting up the tale are all presented in newspaper headlines during the credits sequence. Basically two 11-year old girls are sent to prison for kidnapping and murder of a Black infant girl, and film proper picks up with their lives 7 years after, out of stir and adjusting to the outside world.As adapted by Nicole Holofcener and shakily directed by Amy Berg, movie turns into a suspenser and police procedural, revolving around both who (really) dunnit and also the psychological why? behind the crime. As 18-year olds the two contrasting girls are played by star Dakota Fanning as Ronnie, not helping her cause in transition from child star to adult actress in a one-note, buttoned-up performance as the seeming "dom" of the femme couple and Danielle Macdonald as Alice, giving a very strong, central turn as the seemingly self-loathing obese "sub" of the pair.Structural resemblance (minus all the sex, of course) of the early reels to one of the hundreds of popular Lesbian psychodramas in the video market is evident, as all the characters are female. Men are later introduced into the mix in subsidiary roles, of which Common, the famous rapper, gives the movie's best performance as the not-by-blood parent of a missing girl whose disappearance at a furniture store immediately brings our anti-heroine pair under suspicion. Both kidnappings involve interracial couples and their female offspring, a quite interesting mystery clue.Cop on the new case is Elizabeth Banks, obviously cherishing a cast-against-type tough (yet still vulnerable) lady role, but hampered by a poor plot gimmick that makes her the same cop who was traumatized by finding the very same dead girl that put Ronnie & Alice in jail seven years earlier (though no one in the cast knows this -only Banks and the audience). Other central figure (and the reason I wanted to see the movie in the first place) is lead actress Diane Lane, given an unplayable role as a teacher who is Alice's mother that ends up with her delivering exposition on several key twists, none of them credible, but the ostensible "solution" to the mystery in the final reels.I cannot go into too much detail without exploding several spoilers, but suffice it to say that unlike a legitimate, classical mystery structure (think the Clue board game at the extreme) there is a key character not introduced in the film proper but only in the myriad flashbacks later on that is necessary to make any sense of what happened. I suppose that 21st Century audiences massaged by the hit acronym TV procedurals ("CSI", "NCIS" plus granddaddy "Law & Order") or influential head- scratcher series "Lost" are used to this, but it ruined the movie for me.Further detraction is use of the familiar literary trick: "the unreliable narrator", in this case not RASHOMON but rather intentionally misleading flashbacks early on to represent the point-of- view of untruthful characters, later contradicted by other characters' flashbacks and finally cleared up by the revelations involving personages we never hear from at all, but are merely cogs in the flashback structure. Filmmakers and film editors may be proud of such clever devices, but for me they are simply audience cheats.Except for many sunlit scenes of Alice haunting a pool at country club which opened the film and later wandering the streets seemingly aimlessly (but also a key hint to mystery's unraveling), the film is ugly, probably a function of the budget-wise but artistically detrimental practice of shooting digital rather than using motion picture film stock (even though the credits misleadingly say shot in Panavision to confuse us old-timers (probably referring to lenses)). I saw the movie in a theater so I can hold it to a higher standard.Berg and company also err in using the horror-film format of endless tension and no release - a gimmick that rather than keeping me on the edge of my seat (as intended) just bored me to death. The release doesn't come until the final twist ending, which had me wishing the Hays Office Production Code was still in effect (I'm being cryptic to avoid broadcasting the twist to readers who haven't seen the film yet).Some will find it fun, even a cute ploy, but for me it was merely the latest in an uncountable line of stupid gimmicks dating back in the modern era to the influential trick ending of Brian DePalma's CARRIE -considered a classic in many quarters but a film I detested back in 1976 when seen in first-run with a packed and appreciative audience (so you can easily calibrate where I'm coming from).
