Egoyan skilfully brings these story-lines together as the film builds to its disconcerting conclusion.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 19, 2014

For all its problems, The Captive does try to hit the themes that have obsessed Egoyan for three decades: desire, death, memory, and time.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 19, 2014

Becomes baroque and ludicrous as the Hitchcockian scenario loses its psychological bearings in a web of trashy plot twists and self-conscious jumps in time.

| Dec 18, 2014

"The Captive" may appear to bite off a little more than it can chew but it's one of the most satisfyingly baroque thrillers of the year, and thanks to a perfectly judged performance by Ryan Reynolds, it's quietly heartbreaking, too.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 12, 2014

The infuriatingly vague and downright strange story banishes the haunting delicacy of mood that Mr. Egoyan has conjured so successfully in the past.

| Dec 11, 2014

The structural gamesmanship is just a smokescreen, a way to obfuscate the pulp nature of what is, ultimately, little more than a glorified, low-aiming potboiler.

| Original Score: C+ | Dec 11, 2014

Surely an Oscar-nominated filmmaker like Atom Egoyan ("The Sweet Hereafter") can do better than this nasty and unconvincing thriller.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 10, 2014

When it isn't 온라인카지노추천-movie familiar, Egoyan's film is bughouse crazy, mixing in campy pulp elements that bleed pressure away from the story.

| Dec 9, 2014

The film has the plot of an intensely lurid thriller, but Atom Egoyan can't bring himself to face that and actively tend to the story; instead, he trades in barely coherent, high-brow euphemisms.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Dec 6, 2014

Films about child abuse inevitably come up against the limits of representation itself: morally and legally, how much is acceptable to show? In this case, Egoyan's decision to skip over the details of what happened to Cass makes the film all the creepier.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 3, 2014

"The Captive" bores us with its onscreen mystery while leaving another, more important one unanswered: What exactly happened to director Atom Egoyan?

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 24, 2014

The Captive recapitulates the arc of Egoyan's career: early promise, followed by arrant misfires.

| Sep 24, 2014

[Egoyan] builds incredible tension and emotion in this thriller by throwing the audience pieces of the jigsaw -- in the wrong order.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 23, 2014

Without a thin tether to credibility, this fussy, morbid fantasy simply slides off into the void.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 5, 2014

Its eeriness creeps up on you and taps you on the shoulder, and when you spin around, it's still behind you.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 23, 2014

Beneath the well-tuned atmospherics lurks a schlocky, ludicrous and distasteful yarn

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 19, 2014

For every way that The Sweet Hereafter makes its generic elements seem fresh and even a trifle mysterious, The Captive finds new ways to render them absurd.

| May 17, 2014

...right down to the nearly synonymous title we get a lurid, silly Prisoners me-too...

| Original Score: D | May 16, 2014

[A] film too absurd to take seriously, but too strange to ignore.

| May 16, 2014

The director renders an already bogus story more preposterous by lathering it in portentous solemnity ...

| May 16, 2014