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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (21) | Top Critics (9) | Fresh (3) | Rotten (18)
Dramas about the porn industry range from expressions of puritanical rage to celebrations of open sexuality; this one manages to avoid both extremes, as well as anything else that might make it worth watching.
Here is a movie that suggests prostitution is something that just sort of happens to you, like Lyme disease.
This is just a slow-moving skin flick broken up by lots of boring discussions about Cherry's future.
The fatal flaw ... is its refusal to examine Angelina's occupation from outside the bubble. You might even call it a recruitment film.
Everything here is done badly.
It has a didactic undercurrent, making its main character into a beautiful blank, ready to blossom under the bright camera lights and to be unabashed in the face of the unenlightened.
Possesses some very fine moments complete with great performances, particularly from Hinshaw.
When a guilty perv is all a film has to offer by way of a protagonist then it's probably in the best interests of us all if it doesn't exist.
almost laughably unsexy
Rather shockingly lacking in dynamic plotting, the film descends into mystifying incomprehensibility in its final reels, showing a lack of understanding of basic human motivations.
So much of About Cherry is meant to titillate and dramatize but never humanize.
Generates a sensual world existing on top of the real one, where many people work non-ideal jobs simply to pay the bills.
It is irritating to see a movie so awfully edited and structured, full of artificial conflicts and with a horrible dialogue, unable even to maintain focus and, worst of all, to offer any particularly interesting insight into its protagonist, who remains in the end a poorly delineated sketch.
Super Reviewer
With her mother(Lili Taylor) being an alcoholic, 18-year old Angelina(Ashley Hinshaw) is left to take care of her younger sister Jojo(Maya Raines). At the same time, Angelina desperately wants to spread her wings and live her own life. But her job at a laundromat is not going to get her far. So, she poses nude for Vaughn(Ernest Waddell). That gets her the money for her and her friend Andrew(Dev Patel) to move to San Francisco. That's where she works as a waitress in a strip club where she meets Frances(James Franco). Alternately erotic and chaste, "About Cherry" does admittedly suffer from a lack of focus at times. But it is also refreshing in it not being a garden variety cautionary tale. Rather, it is about somebody who is surrounded by cautionary tales. And it is a nice touch that the movie depicts a corner of the adult film industry as being both gay and female friendly. Out of all the surprises here, the biggest has to be the neat turn by none other than Heather Graham.
Unfocused and lazy, About Cherry is a poorly made film that's kind of pretentious. There's not much of a plot: a teen runaway heads to San Francisco and gets involved in the pornography industry. However, as provocative as the material is the film doesn't seem to know what it wants to say about it. The cast features Ashley Hinshaw, James Franco, and Heather Graham, but the material limits them. Bland and superficial, About Cherry is uninspired and pointless.
Americans have a curious relationship with porn. It's a billion dollar industry with a product enjoyed by most of the population yet it's coverage in the media would have you think it's run solely by criminals. Any films tackling the subject have always focused on the negative aspects, most of which are applicable to any get-rich-quick business, of the industry. 'About Cherry' bucks the trend, showing the world of porn as far less maladjusted than the mainstream. Hinshaw does a good job in the lead role and is undoubtedly a star in the making. The film itself is quite a bore, filled with cliched characters like the manipulative alcoholic mother (Taylor), the disapproving boyfriend (Franco), and the platonic friend (Patel) who can't express his true feelings for our protagonist. Hinshaw's breasts aside, there's nothing here we haven't seen before.
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