There's a fine line between refreshing candor in movie reviews, and the kind of oversharing that tickles the "look, I just wanted a thumbs up, not emotional scarring" area at the back of your brain.

This was made abundantly evident in Harry Knowles's review of Doubt, in which he admitted that a dark chapter from his past rendered John Patrick Shanley's intricate morality puzzler all the more resonant:

I absolutely do not believe Father Brendan had improper contact with the boy in question, but I do believe he had some manner of scandal in his life prior to this station and he did not want it brought out into the open.

BUT I COULD BE WRONG. And that's the delight of this movie. There is no rock solid evidence. No teary confessions, only innuendo and supposition.

Of course I sympathized with Hoffman's character - as there was a point in my life where I caught a ranch hand on my mother's ranch stealing tools and guns, and had to go to school. By the time I returned from school, the ranch hand told my mother that he saw me molest my sister - and my mother being an alcoholic emotional wreck, had the ranchhands beat me with riding crops till my back bled while being forced into brutal manual labor with a post-hole digger.

The next day I told her what had happened, the ranch hand in question had left and she discovered that I was telling the truth (as many of her guns had in fact been stolen and tools taken) and I was proved innocent. BUT that doesn't take away the rather terrifying experience that the mere whisper of wrongdoing did and the harsh memories that I will always carry from that experience.

In a similar vein, Ben Lyons recently admitted that his gushing review of The Love Guru may have actually been the result of psychic repression—a fact that became all too clear when he was flooded by the memory of certain unspeakable acts perpetrated upon him in a Marriott suite by Mike Meyers, all in exchange for a chummy snapshot addition to his ever-growing Lyons Den gallery.