Bully

Directed by Lee Hirsch

(Not rated)

***

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Bully is “a documentary as vivid as any horror film,” said Richard Corliss in Time. Director Lee Hirsch spent a recent school year profiling five young victims of brutal peer abuse, including two who had committed suicide. The cruelty on view is so eye-opening that the movie begs to be screened in schools, “so it could provide a clear mirror of distorted values to young victimizers and their victims alike.” Hirsch manages to capture the “unfathomable despair” of the suicides’ parents, but his film—soon to be released in a PG-13 version—is equally harrowing when following a 12-year-old victim in Iowa, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Sioux City’s Alex Libby is “a bright, aware kid with an awkward manner,” and he’s so desperate to connect with his antagonists that it seems possible that no adults would have learned of the insults and beatings he endures had Hirsch’s camera not captured them. Once Bully turns its attention to an anti-bullying advocacy group, it begins to feel a bit like “an extended PSA,” said David Fear in Time Out New York. That said, it might be “the artiest infomercial ever”—and among the most powerful.