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A slow burn mystery in which the secrets aren’t so much about the crimes it explores but truths of women’s emotional lives that are too often ignored. I’m “biast” (pro): I’m desperate for movies about women

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

I have not read the source material

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

Mere weeks after two teenaged girls are released after seven years in juvenile detention for the horrific kidnap and killing of a baby, another little girl — one who bears a striking resemblance to the dead child — goes missing. Did they commit another murder? (Did they even both commit the first crime? Each is still placing all the blame entirely on the other.) Or does their small upstate New York town merely want this new kidnapping to be their doing?

With Every Secret Thing, documentarian Amy Berg makes...

Baby Blues: Berg’s Troubled and Troubling Feature Debut

Treated to a chilly reception following its premiere at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival last spring, the feature debut of documentarian Amy Berg will see a theatrical release amidst the encroaching fanfare of her next highly provocative doc concerning teen sex rings in Hollywood, An Open Secret, hitting theaters only a few weeks later. The timing is certainly convenient for Every Secret Thing, perhaps a move to overshadow the critiques of her latest, as Berg seems noticeably less comfortable in the realm of narrative storytelling, especially if you’ve seen her hailed work on Deliver Us From Evil and West Memphis Three, now part of a growing body of work haunted by the specter of sexual transgressions involving preadolescents. This latest is based on a novel by Laura Lippman, a mystery writer who began as a journalist, which seems an inspired...