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RE: "From Ebert's review of the currently playing Kevin Bacon film, The Woodsman:
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"For the first several scenes of "The Woodsman," we know that Walter has recently been released from prison but we don't know the nature of his crime. Seeing the film at Cannes last May, I walked in without advance knowledge and was grateful that I had an opportunity to see Kevin Bacon establish the character before that information was supplied. His crime has now been clearly named in virtually everything written about the film, and possibly changes the way it affects a viewer.

"Walter is a pedophile."
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There it is. Your god, giving away a surprise element about a main character in a currently released film, and fobbing it off as "everyone else is saying it," with no further vitriol issued to the other critics."

Nice try, boyo, but it doesn't quite pass mustard. The difference is that between the premeir of the Woodsman at the Cannes film festival in May and the December release of the movie in selected theaters, the studio itself took every opportunity it could to put the pedophilia angle into all public knowledge of the film; critics were unanimously authorized to reveal the lead character's pedophilia because it was considered to be the main source of conflict in the plot, and indeed every single review that I've read for the Woodsman mentioned that Bacon plays a pedophile.

The difference between MDB's "secret" and the Woodsman's is that the Woodsman's never WAS.