Seltzer Bad acting, bad writing, bad lighting, bad camera work, and lots of fake humping moments. Ugh! I think this is, perhaps, the worst film I've ever seen and that's saying a lot considering that I am a big Roddy McDowall fan which means that I have sat through a lot of schlock in my time waiting him to show up in the many, many bad movies he made during his later career. I wish McDowall had been in this film, at least I would have some excuse for having sat through it besides the fact that the dog was snoozing on my arm so I didn't like to disturb him by searching in the cushions of the couch for the remote control. Can you tell that I'm just typing away trying to get to the 10, (wait, spell it out, that's more characters) ten required lines for an IMDb review when I really said all I had to say about this film in the first two sentences of this review?

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.

fedor8 Solid, but not more that. Brenneman's and Keener's characters are totally unsympathetic, especially the former's, which is right-out repulsive. Not boring, but I've seen plenty of this type of pseudo-indie relationshit (half-)comedies, and a lot of them are much better than this one. A good cast, but the ending is hollow, and the only "bite" the film has is its often over-the-top sexual crudeness. Also, a bit predictable; I knew that Kinski & Keener would get involved in a lesbian affair, and I had sensed that Patric would have a homosexual streak in him. How very politically correct to cover both sides of the homosexual fence

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.