Reviews

Sometimes when you're watching a movie from the 20s, there's a scene that's framed kind of flat, or a performance that just doesn't work, and you think "Well, yeah, the early days of film and they were still figuring things out."

It feels like the movie trying to connect the dots in terms of why we linger on the bodies and killings of some of the female characters, and I didn't totally buy it.

The scenes where Finn talks to the previous murder victims are staged in different ways, and for the most part they work pretty well.

A touch that I loved in the film was the way that Daigo always looked at the photographs of the deceased people.

Again, the film seems to switch effortlessly between moments that almost feel documentary---like a stop at the border---to moments that are unabashedly cinematic.

I always have such mixed feelings when a novel I like is adapted to film.

There are a lot of ways that this film is underwhelming and kind of dumb.

When the film gets to its final act, it really doesn't know what to do with itself, and ends up with sort of a King Kong/Frankenstein mish-mash.

Likewise, in a film where we're asked to appreciate the nuances of child mistreatment, the character of the perpetually sloshed neighbor (Allison Janney) who mocks her own young child with a lazy eye feels wrong.

One element that makes bagging on the film a little less fun is knowing that Reynolds died of suicide after completing the film (not necessarily connected, but still .