WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

SnoopyStyle Arden (Toni Collette) is a painfully shy and isolated living her cruel bed ridden mother (Piper Laurie). One day she finds a dead girl in her yard. She becomes the talk of the town and is asked out by the creepy bag boy Rudy (Giovanni Ribisi).Leah (Rose Byrne) is a dutiful fragile daughter. Her parents (Mary Steenburgen, Bruce Davison) is still searching for their missing daughter for 15 years. Leah suffers from the oppressive need to find her sister.Ruth (Mary Beth Hurt) and Carl (Nick Searcy) are a fighting couple with a storage place. She finds some troubling things in one of the storage lockers.Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) has come to L.A. looking for her runaway daughter last seen as a 16 year old Krista (Brittany Murphy). She befriends Krista's former roommate Rosetta (Kerry Washington).Usually a multi-storyline movie like this can be a problem. The common trouble happens when some of the story really disappoints. The good news for this movie is that every story is compelling with great actors. The movie starts with the amazing Toni Collette and never really declines in the class of acting. Director/writer Karen Moncrieff has crafted a very simple story. It's the powerful acting that elevates the movie.

Rodrigo Amaro I went ahead with "The Dead Girl" knowing little about the story, but knowing everyone involved with. Left myself to be taken by what it was about to be presented, following its surprises, trying to enjoy everything. Gathering and holding the pieces together revealed a little satisfying picture, I must say, whose biggest attractive was in the reunion of people like Toni Collette, James Franco, Marcia Gay Harden, Giovanni Ribisi, Rose Byrne, Mary Steenburgen, Bruce Davison, Brittany Murphy, Josh Brolin, Mary Beth Hurt, Kerry Washington, Piper Laurie and Nick Searcy. And if not them, what else then? "The Dead Girl" is a hyperlinked movie revolving missing persons, in this case a dead girl (Murphy) found by a poor woman (Collette), fact this that changes her life after meeting a strange (Ribisi) interested in the case. From that, the movie swindles between chapters offering us the many perspectives of people related with her death, in one way or the other, or only her disappearance depending on who's trying to find her. It's just about following those lives in a short period of time trying to figure what's next but most of it it's easily answered. One of the interesting connections made in the story relates to a young forensic (Byrne) who, along with her hopeful parents (Steenburgen and Davison), is searching for her missing sister and the recently found body could be of hers but it proves to be that it's not. It's from this point the film takes off by stating on how painful and difficult is the task of finding a missing person, specially when you're this close to the case, you care about the person and the only hope is to get some result from your searches, even if ulmitately a dead body. "The Dead Girl" works best only as a dramatic flick, often tiring in its suffocating slow pace and lacking of thrills to be a competent thriller. Mystery isn't so impactant or anything similar because it just answer to us what really happened but it never completes it to the characters. It just gives one turn in one ride, so the mother won't find about her daughter's destiny but she'll find some answers and one big surprise, just to give an example. As mentioned in the beginning this worths because of the cast included, most of them giving good performances, specially Mary Beth Hurt standing out as the killer's wife. Her segment is the most terrifying, and we feel a lot for her character from the moment her husband (Searcy) disappears, then people come after him and later she discovers the truth about him. Throughout the segments most of the time you don't buy the story because you're seeing the famous faces acting in it while in her segment it's feels real, she and Searcy are the characters (and it's strange because they're veteran actors with countless pictures but their lack of outstanding fame allows them to go deep in the performances, looking natural). Marcia Gay Harden's segment was also very good, she had powerful interactions with Kerry Washington. The saddest part of all was having to watch Piper Laurie doing a poor version of Carrie's mother again (but with Collette as daughter). Not only you get angry at her character and her abusive manners of treating her daughter but you feel even angrier at the people who cast her in this role. She already done that, why do it again? And it was a weak performance.Good movie, it might leave you thinking a lot of stuff for a bit but it's just another frame of mind. 6/10

zetes The body of a young woman is discovered naked in a field. This film tells four short stories about the people around this person, and a fifth about the girl herself. It is an amazing achievement, like if Alejandro González Iñárritu made a film where the story worked. The first segment deals with the woman who finds the body (Toni Collette), her unbearable mother (Piper Laurie) and the possibly dangerous stranger she meets (Giovanni Ribisi). The second story is about a young woman (Rose Byrne) whose own sister has been missing for the past 15 years. Of course she misses her sister, but her life has been consumed by her mother's desperate belief that her daughter is alive (Mary Steenburgen plays the mother and Bruce Davison her father). When Byrne, working as a mortician, comes upon the young girl's body, she thinks it may be her sister. Or at least she hopes so. James Franco also stars as Byrne's co-worker who wants to be more. The third segment is about the killer himself (Nick Searcy) and his long-suffering wife (Mary Beth Hurt), an extremely religious and oppressive woman who has probably driven Searcy to multiple murders. Hurt discovers her husband's dirty secret. The fourth segment is about the dead girl's real mother (Marcia Gay Harden), who has to come to grips with her own failure as a mother (her daughter ran to L.A. to become an actress and instead ended up a prostitute). The fifth and final stars Brittany Murphy as the girl. It's pretty hard to watch so soon after her death. It's absolutely devastating. Most of the movie is quietly devastating. The second segment, even if it didn't directly connect with Murphy's character, was the most powerful to me. Byrne and Steenburgen are both undervalued actresses, and the climactic argument between them is extraordinarily powerful. My second favorite would be the fourth segment. Marcia Gay Harden is another actress who can almost never do wrong, and she delivers here (in a film of great performances, hers is definitely the best). I liked the other three segments a lot, too. Writer/director Karen Moncrieff falls into melodrama once in a while, especially during the final sequence (though she ends it at a perfect moment, encapsulating the film's major theme, of mother/daughter relationships) - junkie prostitutes are a film subject that is maybe a little too overexplored. But mostly she creates three-dimensional characters and moving situations. Her direction is not unique, but I'd rather have it straight than showy (screw you Iñárritu). Plus, the most overlooked aspect of direction is bringing out the performances, and she does that over and over again here. It's a remarkable film (that certainly did not deserve to be released pretty much straight to DVD, though I definitely see how hard this one would be to sell). I want to see her first feature and I hope to see Moncrieff find a place in actual theaters in the future.

malcotoro No mere directorial debut from Karen Moncrieff, as I watched again it came to me all the stars who wanted to have roles in this production Brittany Murphy, Marcia Gay harden, Josh Brolin, James Franco, Kerry Washington, Piper Laurie Rose Byrne and Toni Collette (Australians) the usually excellent Giovanni Ribisi and solid Mary Steenburgen, Bruce Davison quite a cast... it shows how a serial killer can get away with it for so long, the devastating effects on the families of his victims, the sadness, the loss... an important movie I think... Britanny's daughter the little girl in the backseat as she goes to a new life with her Grannie is something else...the scene brings tears to the eyes