not as good as all the hype

Excellent film with a gripping story!

Charming and brutal

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

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.

Director Amy Berg is better known for documentaries such as Deliver Us from Evil and West of Memphis; that might be the reason why her dramatic debut, Every Secret Thing, feels a bit dry and impersonal despite its sordid story and the scabrous themes it handles. Nevertheless, I found it a competent thriller with a good atmosphere and excellent performances. The chain of causes and consequences in the screenplay of Every Secret Thing is interesting, but the film lacks of the energy and expressiveness which would have made it genuinely transcendent. Berg might have feared her reserved thriller to become a sensationalist TV movie from Lifetime, and because of that, she took a special care with the level of emotions and the volume of the drama, something I truly appreciate... however, that decision slowed down the impetus of the film a bit, and the final result is an entertaining, but not completely satisfactory, movie. As for the actors, Elizabeth Banks brings a brilliant work in which she proves her big talent outside the comedy once more; Diane Lane perfectly displays a good level of threat in her character, something completely different to her usual roles as victim or comprehensive wife; Dakota Fanning is used to playing this kind of solemn and tortured characters, but that doesn't make her performance less solid; and Danielle Macdonald is an authentic revelation, simultaneously displaying tragedy, optimism and a certain cruelty. With a less shy director, Every Secret Thing could have been a much more memorable film; but in its current state, it's a decent movie which preferred narrative moderation over emotional impact. I respect that decision, but the film didn't reach the potential suggested by its disturbing story. I hope that Berg will be able to find the adequate balance between her analytical instinct and the necessary passion to bring the material to life in her next dramatic project.

This film definitely borders on the macabre.Two little brats, equally disturbed, kidnap a baby and literally let it die and are sent to a reformatory for what they have done.Fast forward seven years later: The girls are released and begin telling varied tales which of course leads to one blaming the death of the child on the other.When a second inter-racial child is snatched, naturally suspicion arises regarding our two females.Diane Lane is in a most perplexing character. She is an elementary school teacher and mother of Alice, a very heavy set girl, who walks around. Where is the shame that the Lane character should have for a daughter doing such a thing? Amazing with her own irrational behavior that she was able to continue in the teaching profession.The film takes an odd twist when it is learned that Alice was impregnated during her stay and gave birth to a child. She is desperately looking for that child and participated solely in the second kidnapping. She states that with a life gone, she can now bring life to her child.On top of all this, the other girl is eventually shown to be the real culprit and Alice is totally exonerated. Exonerated? After all, she did snatch the second child.The film is definitely quite eerie in nature.

A three year old child goes missing in a small town where two teenage girls live, girls who had been recently released from prisoned for a previous child kidnapping and murder. Needless to say, suspicion soon falls on them.The central idea in this film recalls the notorious British crime, the Jamie Bulger case. In this instance two young boys kidnapped and killed a toddler. It created a media storm and has remained notorious ever since. For this reason, the ideas underpinning this story are based on controversial ground but the film itself is handled in a very understated manner. It's partly a police procedural mystery and part psychological drama. Of the former, it is perhaps not as intriguing as it could be, although admittedly it does have some twists and turns; of the latter it is perhaps more successful where it looks at why a couple of damaged girls and one mother act the way they do. It's an efficient film, rather than an especially good one but it did keep my interest from start to finish.