Review of Igby Goes Down (2002) by Dominick R — 07 Jan 2009

I watched this, pretty immediately after the Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys, and Kirean Culkin's improvement in acting was really incredible. This film does justice the cliche story of a boy being bumped around by the eccentrics around him.

The weakest link was Ryan Phillipe, the actor who played his older brother. Phillipe's performance was beyond clever parody, it seems like he was doing the most obvious thing ever, which again bothered me.

But as I'm writing this, Im realizing I may have missed the entire point of his performance, and maybe it was supposed to be obviously superficial. See it.