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90Arlington Road belongs to that splendid Hollywood tradition of dealing with serious, timely issues in the form of a suspense thriller.
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80Despite its flaws, Arlington Road romps home as an absorbing, unpredictable thriller.
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80It plays lots of cool mind games with the audience -- if in an occasionally incoherent way -- and ends up providing a surprising amount of fun.
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80While this film's conception of a terrorist threat is apparent early on, its strength lies in a string of ingenious little surprises.
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80Arlington Road does a nice job of keeping things speculative enough to remain interesting.
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80An intelligent, insidiously plotted Hitchcockian thriller directed in souped-up, modern expressionistic style.
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75Although it takes something of a slog to get there, this thriller finally comes through where it counts.
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75Deceptively keen as both a paranoid political thriller and a caveat against the trustworthiness of your friends and neighbors.
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75Slippery issues about trust, parental responsibility, and the inalienable American right to personal and political freedom are ceded to Hollywood's inalienable right to stage high-pitched chase scenes and a shocking big finish.
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70A movie where style and craft are fatally confused with substance, and where almost no effort is made to make the characters seem like believable people.
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70If the bad guys in the real world were all this obvious, life would be a whole lot easier.
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70If you don't ponder too much the script's muddled, self-serving influences, Arlington Road succeeds at discomforting a viewer and making one apt to look over one's shoulder for a day or two.
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70Before it finally twists itself into a pretzel in the third act, this paranoid thriller creates a scary mood and allows its leading actors to go all the way with it.
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70Though a thematically ambitious and deftly acted thriller, the film is also shockingly coldblooded and not a little reactionary.
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70What will divide viewers is the plot; either the ending makes no sense or it forces you to rethink everything that went before.
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67Amidst the rubble of political rhetoric that underlies Arlington Road, one thing is clear: The enemy is us.
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63A classy but over-contrived topical thriller about bomb plots and anti-government groups.
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60The mode is hysteric-Hitchcockian, the result mostly devoid of suspense.
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60Although the film starts out with well-mounted menace, Arlington Road becomes increasingly overwrought and predictable.
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Even before the film has worked up a head of steam, it has started to pile up the improbabilities, giving us reason to question its credibility.
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58A clumsy and incompetent thriller for nine-tenths of its length, but it has an ending so clever and that goes so wildly against expectations it almost exonerates the film.
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50A conspiracy thriller that begins well and makes good points, but it flies off the rails in the last 30 minutes.
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50The screenplay stretches the viewer's credulity far beyond the breaking point, asking us to accept dozens of absurd contrivances and coincidences.
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50A successful thriller makes you forget such impossibilities, but here they poison every scene.
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50The idiosyncratic instrumentation and melodies in the score by Angelo Badalamenti ("Blue Velvet") and a masterful opening scene are wasted on this pathetic thriller.
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10This masterpiece started out at around three stars, but after the credits, it just got sillier and more lurid.
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Positive: 6 out of 7
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Mixed: 0 out of 7
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Negative: 1 out of 7
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PaulW.1
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KeithC.10Very well written. You think the hero may actually save the day and they pull the rug right out from under you...Incredible twist.