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100Larry Clark's Bully calls the bluff of movies that pretend to be about murder but are really about entertainment. His film has all the sadness and shabbiness, all the mess and cruelty and thoughtless stupidity of the real thing.
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80If you stick with Bully through its seemingly endless repetition of themes and its hurl-inducing hand-held camerawork, it does build a crude, indefinable power.
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80Ferocious and sometimes creepily funny, Bully is a raunchy suburban "Crime and Punishment."
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80The tone -- a combination of earnestness and gallows humor -- is strangely appropriate.
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75The movie's somber message is worth heeding, and the acting is mostly excellent.
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75There's a terrible beauty to the work of Larry Clark, the controversial photographer turned filmmaker, that transcends chic nihilism.
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75That the actors can work under such scrutiny is amazing, and they are superb. The standout is Brad Renfro as Marty, the kid most under the thumb of the neighborhood bully.
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75The important thing is that Clark has found a new way to be creepy, which isn't easy. In the process he has created something irresistibly watchable, the kind of original piece that might mean less but reveal more than its creator intended.
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63Nothing new to say, and, in the end, no real point to make.
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58With its smooth skinned cast and demonized adults, doesn't feel very authentic.
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50Clark denies his audience the catharsis, resolution and renewal of classical tragedy. The film reduces its viewers to helplessness, and I'm not sure that's its intent.
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50Unpleasant stuff, and Clark pounces on the material with his usual relish and a discomfiting combination of moralizing and prurience.
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50If it weren't so rivetingly realistic, it would be an easy film to dismiss. And if it weren't so easily dismissible, it would be an easy film to defend.
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50It feels like a peek into the closet of a pedophile and it's genuinely discomforting.
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50The film's start-and-go rhythm can be as maddening as the characters' amorality and sheer wallowing stupidity, but Clark has an uncanny talent for putting atmosphere on celluloid.
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My problem is that the lack of narrative structure deprives the film of any suspense, and without suspense the film eventually collapses from its own heat like a soufflé that has been in the oven just a few minutes too long.
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40Oddly, Bully's only moments of power come at the film's end, after the crime takes place.
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38Just withers compared with many older, better movies about teen alienation and nihilism, from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "River's Edge."
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38One has to wonder about the mind-set of a middle-aged filmmaker who repeatedly seeks out material about amoral and promiscuous teenagers with little to say.
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30Whatever his intentions, Clark, in his third outing as a director, has come up with a film that is seriously flawed.
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30Like the recent "Baise-moi," Bully is a whole lot of shock and titillation trying to pretend it's saying something. Unlike the French import, however, there's no awareness of its own absurdity, nor anything for the audience to care about in the slightest.
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25A truly repulsive piece of trash that says far more about the absence of values from contemporary filmmaking than the waywardness of teens.
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20The script is worse than slack, and despite its lurid premise, Bully doesn't have "Kids" tabloid immediacy.
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20A riot of sleazy camera moves, bad acting, and maladroit profane dialogue.
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10It's instructive to compare Bully with Jean-Pierre Ameris's "Bad Company," which tackles similar themes and manages to be explicit without stooping to cheap salaciousness. It's a genuinely disturbing film. Bully, in contrast, is merely disgusting.
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10By turns turgid, embarrassing and plain off-putting.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 22 out of 29
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Mixed: 1 out of 29
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Negative: 6 out of 29
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RobertN.10
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TealH.3
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Dr.S.8