Metacritic reviews

Every Secret Thing is not built to satisfy, and so its sour ending doesn’t help its uneven experience. Every Secret Thing is not unlike last autumn's abduction drama "Prisoners." Both demonstrate an excellent level of craft and are handsomely shot and composed, but both suffer from narrative issues.

It has a problem that's familiar to competently made, sporadically involving crime procedurals: It's just good enough to inspire wishes that it were better.

Every Secret Thing doesn’t feel like it fell off an assembly line, but that’s not saying that it’s been skillfully engineered. By the end, its rickety narrative architecture collapses entirely, leaving a lot of good actors stranded in the rubble.

It’s described as a smart, suspenseful psychological thriller, but there’s nothing smart about it, and as an alleged thriller, when the mysteries are explained in a twist finale, it could use a psychologist of its own. The only suspense is waiting to see if Diane Lane’s reputation will survive.

The trope of horror-suffused female friendships is a fertile one, but despite a screenwriting credit from the very capable Nicole Holofcener (director of “Enough Said,” among others), Every Secret Thing comes up short.

Every Secret Thing is a small, well-crafted film with a few chilling moments and some fine performances, but it’s a muddled, pedestrian crime thriller.

A cheerless and nonsensical thriller.

Unfortunately, this procedural/character study unfolds in a manner that feels more generic than genuinely deep.

Despite the strenuous efforts of all involved, Every Secret Thing never manages to overcome its overwhelming air of artsy pretension.

Diane Lane has about 15 minutes of underwritten screen time as Helen, Alice’s tart, art-teacher mother. A wooden Elizabeth Banks is the detective who cracked the original case and now heads up the new one. She thought she could handle it. She can’t.