All Good Things: Critic Reviews

It's a pretty picture or would be if the ominous music and camera position didn't seem directed at the man portentously lurking in the background.

As absorbing and detailed as "All Good Things" is, it never manages to levitate beyond tawdry movie-of-the-week voyeurism.

As excellent as Gosling is - and the actor conveys the stillness of the man as well as the voices screaming in his head - Dunst matches him stride for stride.

The case-history script is ever on-message, but Jarecki ignores the little details that create a credible social reality.

The film ends up wrestling itself into a corner, though it's saved by a corrosive central performance from Ryan Gosling and a disconcertingly hypnotic feel.

The script draws insistently obvious psychological connections.

What we have here is a somewhat higher grade of a Lifetime true-crime picture.

The movie never jells.

Kirsten Dunst is so good here as a woman at a loss to understand who her husband really is, and what the true nature of his family involves.

The unsolved crime turns out to be less mysterious than the mind of the killer, nervily portrayed by Gosling as not evil but unaccountably empty.

It's a strange, thrilling tale begrimed by bad memories, by bad deeds.

"All Good Things" has the eerie power of a nightmare.

You go away slack-jawed with shock and sated with the chilling bedtime-story elements of a great unsolved mystery novel you can't put down.

This feverishly creepy but dramatically miscalculated picture reps an unhappy marriage of murky psychodrama and dubious theorizing.

Jarecki, the wealthy co-founder of Moviefone who directed the acclaimed documentary "Capturing the Friedmans," here presents another memorable portrait of a dysfunctional family over three decades.

All Good Things is thoroughly engrossing, a roman a clef that chillingly ponders a puzzle and suggests solutions outlandish enough to be stranger than anything Hollywood, on its own, could make up.

Although the movie posits a solution to an infamous missing person's case, it does so in a manner that is less than satisfying.

An unsettling psychological thriller centered on three riveting performances.

All Good Things throws so many narrative balls in the air that you may struggle to catch up. It's worth the effort. Jarecki is a master of the telling detail.

Gosling is given the barest blueprint of a life gone terribly wrong and the actor struggles to make something out of nothing, though he does manage to give the older David an aura of weirdness that is downright creepy.

Jarecki never settles on what kind of story he wants to tell with these elements, and despite good performances, "All Good Things" veers awkwardly from love story to tragedy, from true-life mystery to black comedy.

One can't help but think that veteran documentarian Jarecki chose to rework this material as drama to benefit his career, not the story. The result is a disjointed art film that opts for ambiguity over clarity...

Jarecki knows how to make scenes of boisterous family reunions and quiet moments between lovers engaging: He fares less well, though, when the story takes a dark turn.

...a movie suspended between bold novelistic invention and journalistic reserve. Be it demerit or credit, Jarecki is no Truman Capote and All Good Things is no In Cold Blood.