| Original Score: 3/5 | May 6, 2006

Reeks of a project desperate for edgy credibility.

| Apr 13, 2006

Argento's film is arguably exploitative, but its real-life horrors are effectively authentic.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 7, 2006

Trying a bit too hard to be a modern cult classic, but it's clear that Argento's heart is in the right place.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 25, 2006

Now the fabricated story of a boyhood that included abandonment, rape and near constant fear and humiliation is a movie. The result is unwatchable.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 24, 2006

Vile beyond redemption.

| Original Score: 0.5/4 | Mar 24, 2006

It's a taxing bit of exploitation, which, although you're glad to know it's a work of fiction, doesn't exactly make a case for itself as art.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 18, 2006

At best, this film raises an all-too-relevant question: Are true-life stories interesting because they're true? Or because they're interesting? At worst, it raises a different question: What if they're neither true nor interesting?

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 18, 2006

There is no redemption, no surcease, and as the film ends the barbarity continues. This film made me intensely uncomfortable, but that was its intention.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 18, 2006

Watchable in a train-wreck kind of way, but you'll probably want to take a shower afterwards.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 10, 2006

This is an execrable movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 10, 2006

Ultimately sabotaged by Argento's own deliriously uncontrollable hysterics.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 9, 2006

Viewer discretion is advised, if only because it's well-nigh unwatchable.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 9, 2006

This film's heart is not deceitful, merely obvious and overbearing.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 9, 2006

The emotionless, overwrought movie's lack of psychological depth or dramatic verisimilitude makes the boy's grim odyssey a curiously remote and unshocking horror show.

| Mar 9, 2006

A degraded and degrading film, of interest only because it's symptomatic of so much that's wrong with the drearily repetitive tabloid mentality that has infected not just the news media, but the whole culture industry.

Full Review | Mar 9, 2006

Argento's entire performance is an act of exhibitionism, and so is the movie, which would have done well to drop that cynical and verbose title and substitute something catchier.

| Original Score: D+ | Mar 8, 2006

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things has a daring that's hard to dismiss, even when it only amounts to Argento shamelessly getting off on human rot.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Mar 8, 2006

If Deceitful is authentic at all, it's in revealing Asia Argento as the mirror opposite of JT LeRoy. One of these characters is a real artist -- or at least a true believer in the cathartic power of autobiography.

Full Review | Mar 7, 2006

A dutiful course in degradation, complete with a roster of villains as well established as those of any soap opera.

Full Review | Mar 6, 2006