An achievement of accomplished filmmaking and superb acting, L.I.E. puts you in the tough spot of unraveling how you feel about what you've viewed.

Despite a little rough stuff here and there, this is one of the more insightful and affecting teen-trauma films of recent years.

Gripping, troubling and deftly acted.

It's a powerful and provocative achievement from a first-time filmmaker of enormous promise.

One of the year's most unsettling -- and perhaps most illuminating -- films.

Superior and original filmmaking. You won't be able to take your eyes off it.

Dano is a real find in this daunting role about a teenager's identity crisis. The subject of the movie is dicey but ultimately deeply rewarding.

L.I.E. has embraced tragedy, folly, perversity and outrageous dark humor. Like "Happiness" and "American Beauty," it takes an unflinching look at the darker aspects of life in American suburbia.

It’s too bad that at the very end L.I.E. settles for an easy, melodramatic resolution; it flies in the face of everything that makes this perceptive, original movie so special.

At its best, L.I.E. offers a rich, dark, bitter slice of contemporary life. But the film's arty embellishments undermine its bleak vision, making it, in the end, a little too easy to take.

A disturbing and provocative study of adolescence and isolation.

The ending is a cheap shot. An inconclusive ending would have been better, and perhaps more honest. The movie and the ending have so little in common that it's as if the last scene is spliced in from a different film.

A mature, insightful and extremely well-acted study of a boy at a crossroads in his life, and a doomed, tortured man who, consciously or not, longs for some kind of redemption, before it's too late.

An original, well-crafted plea that uses restraint instead of titillation to make a cautionary tale that aches with pathos and power.