Dakota Fanning – Chris Barsanti

everysecretthing1 — Diane Lane and Danielle Macdonald in ‘Every Secret Thing’ (Starz Digital)

In Amy Berg’s adaptation of the Laura Lippman domestic thriller Every Secret Thing, a pair of teenaged girls are suspected of abducting a small child years after they were convicted of stealing and murdering a baby of strikingly similar looks.

Every Secret Thing is out now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

Alice (Danielle Macdonald) is both a ball of cheer and a pit of frustrated desires. She perkily pretends to audition for a reality show like some bedroom-dreaming girl many years her junior, and talks eagerly about her exercise and diet regimen. A few flashbacks to childhood humiliations and some choice scenes with her mother Helen (Diane Lane, dripping with well-meaning malice), though, make clear that Alice is marinating in a cold, calculated outsider rage even before the police come calling. Her fellow convict, Ronnie (Dakota Fanning), wears her anger right out on her raccoon-eyed, heavily made-up face. The story circumnavigates around Ronnie’s poor, straitened existence for most of the earlier stretches, focusing instead on Alice and her dreamy fantasy world in which few glimmers of reality ever seem to intrude…

Here’s the trailer:

Dakota Fanning, Jesse Eisenberg, and Peter Sarsgaard in 'Night Moves' (Cinedigm) — Dakota Fanning, Jesse Eisenberg, and Peter Sarsgaard in ‘Night Moves’ (Cinedigm)

A trio of environmental conspirators try to blow up a Pacific Northwest dam in Kelly Reichardt’s superbly quiet but tension-laced new film, Night Moves, which is playing now in limited release.

My review is at Film Racket:

The green activists plotting to blow up a dam in Kelly Reichardt’s sublimely nervy new film don’t talk about why they’re doing it. By the time the film catches up with them, the trio has already set their minds on a plan of action. They talk shop here and there, one grousing about all the golf courses being built in a dry climate, another about how the oceans will be dead from pollution by 2048. But there’s no deeper investigation into the why of what they’re about to do or whether they should do it. They just know that the dam, that hulking concrete symbol of humanity domineering nature, must come down. “It wants to come down,” one says dreamily. The introspection comes afterward, with a vengeance…

Here’s the trailer:

Chris Barsanti

Tag: Dakota Fanning

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