Bully (2001)
Average Rating: 5.7/10
Reviews Counted: 91
Fresh: 49 | Rotten: 42
With its lingering shots of naked teenage bodies, Bully feels more sordidly exploitative than realistic.
Average Rating: 5.2/10
Critic Reviews: 27
Fresh: 13 | Rotten: 14
With its lingering shots of naked teenage bodies, Bully feels more sordidly exploitative than realistic.
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Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 22,846
Movie Info
Photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark, who made a controversial feature debut with the disturbing drama Kids, returns with another disquieting look at amoral and sexually precocious youth. Bobby (Nick Stahl) is a high school student growing up in southern Florida in the early '90s. Bobby is also a borderline psychotic; he frequently lashes out with brutal violence against those around him and especially enjoys humiliating his best friend Marty (Brad Renfro). While Bobby professes to hate and
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Cast
-
Brad Renfro
Marty Puccio -
Rachel Miner
Lisa Connelly -
Nick Stahl
Bobby Kent -
Bijou Phillips
Ali Willis -
Michael Pitt
Donny Semenec -
Kelli Garner
Heather Swaller -
Daniel Franzese
Derek Dzvirko -
Leo Fitzpatrick
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All Critics (111) | Top Critics (37) | Fresh (49) | Rotten (42) | DVD (13)
...an exploitation teen movie in the pejorative sense of the word.
[Larry] Clark is not enough of a good director to pass this off as art...
Clark is not a moralist, which is good, but he is not much of a dramatist either. You get the impression that the fascination with youth in his movies, just like in his photos, provides an excuse for voyeurism.
A bit long and repetitive.
An extremely disturbing tale of escalating peer pressure.
'Bully' demands attention for the way in which it forces us to watch and digest a dark slice of American society. American beauty this ain't.
hose involved in the real life story this film is based on should be disgusted -- for both sides were truly cheated out of the respect they deserved.
Thanks, Larry Clark, for this festering little slice of suburban life: a perfect respite from 2001's summer of predictable Hollywood programming.
A brutal, though darkly humorous film.
Bully is a well-made film about an ugly incident. It deserves to be seen.
The first 45 minutes or so of Bully is so similar to Kids, with the teens doing absolutely nothing except having sex and getting high, that it almost negates the effectiveness of the rest of the film.
This time tough, as Clark indulges once more in voyeuristically displaying underage sexuality and amoral behaviour, I can't let it pass.
Whatever the motivations are that fuel director Clark, his movie can't be so easily dismissed as trash.
It's Larry Clark who's the bully, a cinematic bovver boy who just can't help himself.
La cinta peca en crudeza y no logra verosimilitud. Bully no alcanza la infame pero gloriosa fama de Kids.
If such material and the pessimism accompanying it make some people uncomfortable, maybe they're starting to get the point.
Joins the list of great American films about killing
A bleak and unrelenting picture of suburban teenage anomie.
There's something troubling about a film which, on the one hand, wants to take a moral stance about a lost generation, and on the other relishes shooting the nubile flesh of its young actors.
Larry Clark has an astonishing way of getting into the minds of teenagers.
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Latest News on Bully
January 17, 2008:
Brad Renfro: 1982-2008Brad Renfro, star of The Client and Apt Pupil, passed away Tuesday of unknown causes. He was 25.
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Movie: ID: 17062 Title: Bully Release Date: 2001-07-13 00:00:00.0 MPAA: 4 Status: 1
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Foreign Titles
- Bully (2001) (DE)
- Bully (2001) (CA)
The first half of the film is crude trash; however it is well-acted crude trash. I wanted to hate the film because I hated every character, but the characters were clearly purposefully constructed to be that way. To hate the film for its ugliness could be deemed as missing the point, I suppose the film acts a cautionary tale, showing what some areas of society can devolve into. In this respect, it 'succeeds'. Its chief success is how it portrays the ugly messiness of violence; it covers a spectrum of emotions from its characters during the visceral, realistically unpleasant climax, a scene that's very well constructed by the preceding twenty minutes or so.
However, Larry Clark's trademark perversion is all over this film, paying gratuitous attention to the bodies and sex of the teenage cast. It's ultimately rather one-dimensional; its narrative of murder is captivating, but its study of reckless, idiotic culture is unnecessary - viewers are already aware of people like this. Its absence of any likeable characters and presence of many detestable ones overshadows the film's merits of decent acting and engaging murder plot. There is essentially no incentive to watch this film, 'Bully' is just another instalment in Clark's portfolio of attention seeking controversy.