Paquet-Brenner invests the split-time action with some brooding menace and the cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, does his best to lend some urgency, even as things spiral from suspense into outright silliness.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 24, 2016

The film, overall, is fatally uncertain of its identity - never quite certain whether it's a gruesome murder-mystery out to shock us or a heavy, character-based drama about a family torn apart.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 22, 2016

All in all, its contrivances might have been indulged more satisfyingly in a 온라인카지노추천 miniseries.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 21, 2016

That unnerving way Flynn has of taking us to dark, deliciously twisted places has been utterly massacred.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 19, 2016

The third offering from Flynn Dark Places does its best to stir a multitude of emotions within us, but in doing so, the film feels contrived and hurried.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 14, 2015

The surface level generic pleasures of Dark Places and the stellar cast are entertaining enough, even if it doesn't quite stick the landing.

| Aug 13, 2015

The mystery itself eventually becomes tiresome and shrug-worthy, even as the film breathlessly racks up the revelations.

| Aug 9, 2015

Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner marshaled a top-tier cast and commanded them to tromp across Flynn's intelligent bestseller like investigators muddying a crime scene.

| Original Score: C- | Aug 7, 2015

Each flashback or revelatory conversation fills in a few more details of the overheated story without giving us a reason to care about it in the first place.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 7, 2015

While there is still some flicking at the book's more human themes of best-intentioned familial deceit, forgiveness and healing, they're all but blotted out by Gilles Paquet-Brenner's slapdash direction.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 7, 2015

The mystery unspools slowly, with so many different twists and turns it's impossible to figure it out ahead of time. That's fine. By the time you get there, however, you probably won't care anymore.

| Original Score: C | Aug 7, 2015

Dingy and dumb. Instead of a quickened pulse, it results in multiple yawns and a "So, that's it? Meh."

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 7, 2015

Welcome to "Dark Places," where you can spend nearly two hours in the presence of some of the most unpleasant people you'll ever have the misfortune to encounter at the movies.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 6, 2015

A convoluted, airless procedural that generates practically no suspense and little that's thematically resonant about lost souls and poisoned memories.

| Aug 6, 2015

Paquet-Brenner wrings the suspense out of "Dark Places" almost from the get-go, with a plodding pace and characters who are meant to be powerfully repressed but only come across as drab.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 6, 2015

A brooding performance by Oscar winner Charlize Theron ... elevates the material from mediocre into bearable.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 6, 2015

"Dark Places" isn't a disaster of a film. Instead, it's the definition of average, and we wish it could have taken us to some more interesting places.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 6, 2015

Inexpert execution, lazy attention to detail and a lackluster lead performance conspire to render a juicy mystery rather boring.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 6, 2015

Existential questions aside, the surface-level generic pleasures of "Dark Places" and the stellar cast are entertaining enough, even if it doesn't quite stick the landing.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 6, 2015

The payoff is a huge and telling visual howler, summarizing the entire plot with a blithe indifference that will inevitably mirror the audience's.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 4, 2015