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Oct 29, 2012100Levinson has always been acutely interested in the minutiae of human behaviour, and it's this concern that makes The Bay the triumph that it is.
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91One hell of a creepy little eco-horror picture.
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90This astonishingly effective environmental nightmare is based on reasoning that, if you've been following the science, seems all too possible.
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83The result is surprisingly satisfying, like "Jaws" for the YouTube/Skype era.
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80Is it, on some level, '70s-style horror schlock dressed up with contemporary gimmicks? Sure, but don't act like that's a bad thing! It's schlock with honor, schlock with a conscience, schlock that speaks to the way we live now.
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80The Bay, a real creepfest, joins the suggestive company of eco-terror entries like Hitchcock's "The Birds" and 1979's "Prophecy."
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Nov 2, 201275A ripped-from-the-headlines psychological chiller that burrows under the skin with its terrifyingly local twist.
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75The Bay manages to scare up a real fear of environmental neglect. It's quite possibly the first example of jump scares used in service of activism.
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75Levinson is interested in humanity, in the small moments that make us who we are, and it's these moments that make The Bay so chilling.
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75Best of all, I applaud the director's triumph of intimate terror over preposterous puppets and noisy computer-generated effects. In The Bay, the mayhem is both fresh and thrilling.
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70It's a small movie but an effective one, using found footage as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. More like it would be a welcome trend.
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63Although there are some scary moments here, and a lot of gruesome ones, this isn't a horror film so much as a faux eco-documentary.
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63The Bay is better than a shallow exercise, but crabby horror fans may have preferred that Levinson took a real plunge.
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Feb 16, 201360All prologue and no pay-off, but compelling all the same, this curio plays out like Diary Of The Dead with more diaries and fewer dead.
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Nov 1, 201260Despite a handful of legit creepy moments, the film's concern with superficial realism prevents it from really hitting home; its fuzzy, fractured depiction of disaster never comes close to conjuring the "holy shit it could happen here don't touch that doorknob" real-world paranoia of last year's artfully Hollywood-ized disaster film, "Contagion."
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50Lacks the creepy immediacy of even the most misbegotten of the found-footage genre.
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Oct 29, 201250The Bay is Barry Levinson's most engaged and entertaining movie since "Wag the Dog," which isn't to say that he's given up his irksome predilection for a certain bullish type of liberalism.
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Nov 2, 201240The story becomes more ridiculous as it escalates, the film's over-determined ecological focus undermining any real horror movie tension. Levinson's casting choices are off-the-mark as well - star Kether Donohue is just plain bad.
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40There is a lot of nasty stuff to look at, but very little that is genuinely haunting, jolting or terrifying.
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25The Oscar-winning director of "Rain Man" - whose last film, the abysmal documentary "PoliWood" never went much further than the Tribeca Film Festival - demonstrates he can make a shakycam found-footage horror movie every bit as fake-looking, clumsy and unscary as your average college student working on a $200 budget.