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.

If you stick with Bully through its seemingly endless repetition of themes and its hurl-inducing hand-held camerawork, it does build a crude, indefinable power.

Ferocious and sometimes creepily funny, Bully is a raunchy suburban "Crime and Punishment."

The tone -- a combination of earnestness and gallows humor -- is strangely appropriate.

The movie's somber message is worth heeding, and the acting is mostly excellent.

That the actors can work under such scrutiny is amazing, and they are superb. The standout is Brad Renfro as Marty, the kid most under the thumb of the neighborhood bully.

There's a terrible beauty to the work of Larry Clark, the controversial photographer turned filmmaker, that transcends chic nihilism.

The important thing is that Clark has found a new way to be creepy, which isn't easy. In the process he has created something irresistibly watchable, the kind of original piece that might mean less but reveal more than its creator intended.

Nothing new to say, and, in the end, no real point to make.

With its smooth skinned cast and demonized adults, doesn't feel very authentic.

Unpleasant stuff, and Clark pounces on the material with his usual relish and a discomfiting combination of moralizing and prurience.

Clark denies his audience the catharsis, resolution and renewal of classical tragedy. The film reduces its viewers to helplessness, and I'm not sure that's its intent.

It feels like a peek into the closet of a pedophile and it's genuinely discomforting.

My problem is that the lack of narrative structure deprives the film of any suspense, and without suspense the film eventually collapses from its own heat like a soufflé that has been in the oven just a few minutes too long.