Reception
Bully has 51% positive reviews on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with 42 of 83 counted reviews giving it a "rotten" rating. The film has an average rating of 5.6 out of 10 — with the consensus: "With its lingering shots of naked teenage bodies, Bully feels more sordidly exploitative than realistic." Film critic Roger Ebert, however, made the opposite case, saying "Larry 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," in his four-star review. On Metacritic, the film holds an average score of 45 out of 100, based on 26 reviews.
Read more about this topic: Bully (2001 film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)