Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

Libramedi Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Antony-4 I must start by saying that, perhaps, this would have gotten better after the first 40 minutes, but I was saved from further suffering by a scratched DVD. Normally you can hit the chapter skip button and chance losing some continuity, but I don't think it would have mattered. Perhaps the outtakes could be funny, given the rotten, trite dialog. I'm glad I checked this out from the library, because this would have been a terrible date movie.The incredible creepiness of the male characters struck me as the worst aspect of the movie. I got the feeling that they might work up to physical violence. Hopefully not.Not that the women portrayed were much better people, although they did look good, so it was at least worth the second star for that.Needless to say, there wasn't anything funny in this "comedy". We didn't even smile, let alone laugh. Ben's "girlie" glasses were almost funny, but they didn't play it up.Anyway, if you want to see a sad, pathetic movie about sad pathetic people and pretend that it's a comedy, go ahead and borrow this from a library. Just about all libraries would have it, since anyone silly enough to have purchased this wreck would want to get rid of it somehow.

LouisaMay If you're a person (especially between 25 and 35), without emotional depth or without spiritual (not necessarily religious) inklings of something beyond yourself, you're morally adrift on a raft of tortuous narcissism. That's what this movie says. Not having emotional depth doesn't mean you don't feel things deeply; it means here you can't empathize with others. In fact the movie shows graphically that without the qualities and sensitivities we think make us most vulnerable, all we can be is mentally wounded, emotionally hurt, damaging to others. A more realistic, sensible portrait of narcissism and its discontents I've never seen. Everyone in this film is so focused on his or her self, nothing that could help can enter. Here is a world without anything transcendent, without even community through which to escape the prison of self absorption. Here is a take on contemporary America.

spinnicks If all our relationships are like the ones in this film, we might as well give up. In "Your Friends and Neighbors" we are introduced to a group of upwardly mobile urbanites who run around a lot but haven't learned how to play well with others. Frustrated desire and strained hopefulness shove the characters around as if some socio-sexual Grinch were gumming up their lives. Watching this movie, you may be tempted to ask if this is the way the world turns or if it is merely the way writer-director Neil LaBute likes to pretend it turns. Produced with an abundance of cool, the film strikes an odd balance between surface and structure. By using a naturalistic veneer, LaBute invites us to accept the characters as if they had been lifted straight from the apartment next door. "Wow," we might say, "So this is real life as it is lived by real people in today's world!" Beneath the surface, however, things look different. If you peel back the actors' performances, you may find yourself staring at some carefully skewed scaffolding. You may even conclude that this picture is more the product of the director's artful calculations than of keen observation into the way people live. Of course there's nothing wrong with a director's offering a vision. Most good directors do. And if you like LaBute's work, you probably won't notice him just off-screen, fussing with his blueprints. An example: an important clue to verisimilitude in fiction is the way characters speak. Here they are presented as intelligent young professionals, yet they turn out to be astonishingly inarticulate types who say things like "I just…I don't know what to say…I mean…it just makes me feel…even if you…because…" After a while this dialog comes off like an acting-class exercise, and while the fractured syntax may be central to LaBute's approach, it can get tedious. One exception stands out: Midway through the film, the stutter-speech is interrupted by a remarkable monologue delivered by Jason Patric. Except for this burst of eloquence, however, we find ourselves listening to people who struggle to express themselves as they stumble through days and nights trying and failing to connect with others who are similarly afflicted. (That's the whole point, you say? Well…I mean…it's just…yeah…right.) There are places in this movie where a certain amount of cuteness can be forgiven—as when a patch of dialog recurs several times in the mouths of different characters—and there are other clever touches here and there. But the best reason for watching "Your Friends and Neighbors" is not the director's vision (assuming he has one) but the performances. The six principal actors make the most of their roles, and it is fun to watch a frenetically unfulfilled Ben Stiller, a romantically perplexed Amy Brenneman, a terminally self-satisfied Jason Patric, a mad but sad Catherine Keener, a well-meaning but clueless Aaron Eckhart and an attractively vapid Nastassja Kinsky wander through a maze that—unfortunately for their characters—leads nowhere.

littlebrownmanfrommars Neil Labute look at relationships is as sharp and as poignant as it ever has been but it lacks the emotional punch and the ferocity of his first effort' In The Company of Men, and his latest' The Shape of Things'. None of the characters in this film is innocent, and they are to be quite honest not that interesting except for Jason Patric, who is playing the character who likes to put all things about the sexes in misogynistic perspective. Catherine Keener, and the great Aaron Eckhart are fine as well but the movie on the whole is not really interesting enough to make you invest your time with them. See In The Company of Men, and The Shape of Things instead.