Metacritic reviews

At times the movie feels like two Very Special Episodes of "Law & Order: SVU" stitched together, but on balance it's a smart, well-cast piece of grown-up entertainment.

It’s a solid genre outing with unsettling topical resonance.

Roberts brings an acrid sense of bitterness and sorrow to this exceedingly sharp-witted sleuth, registering the cruel passage of time and the toll of unspeakable tragedy in every careworn feature and vocal quaver.... it’s a skillful and humane turn from an actress whose darkly penetrating gaze comes closest to fulfilling the mystery of the title.

Yet nothing short of overhauling the material into something genuinely fresh could make Ray’s Secret feel essential. Tweaks aside, it remains, by in large, the same movie — which is to say, fundamentally redundant.

Perhaps some of the same flaws lay beneath the surface of the original film, but the distraction of subtitles helped hide them. Here, they’re gaping holes knock “Secret” off the tracks long before it’s far-fetched twist ending.

Julia Roberts is the only central character whose appearance is drastically different in the two time periods, and it remains to be seen if the pretty woman with the million-dollar smile will be accepted as a character bearing a pinched face and dead eyes or whether it will seem like stunt casting despite a solid performance.

Writer-director Billy Ray's Americanized redux isn't a disaster, exactly; it keeps its head down and does its job. But nothing quite gels, or clicks, or makes itself at home in its adopted setting.

“Secret” contains a passel of interesting ideas and effective scenes that don’t add up to an interesting whole.

Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.

The central mystery has been drastically altered to fit Julia Roberts, its most telling clue diluted, and a signature sequence that made soccer exciting now makes baseball duller.