| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 18, 2011

| Original Score: 1/5 | Nov 17, 2011

The whole distasteful mess is sunk up to its neck in a brew of Southern Gothic atmosphere and hocus-pocus sentimentality.

| Original Score: 0/4 | Oct 31, 2008

Hounddog boasts a distinctive wood-and-emerald look and several crackerjack performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 31, 2008

Only Fanning's emotional honesty makes Hounddog watchable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 18, 2008

...as discomfiting as you've heard, yet there is one moment near the end that nearly saves it.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 8, 2008

Fanning resembles an acting robot: stick a quarter in her head and she'll dial up any reaction in the book, absent the needed gravitas.

| Original Score: D+ | Oct 2, 2008

We're seeing Fanning in soaking wet white underwear playing in the river, gyrating like Elvis. That's worse that an exploitative rape scene. This is just the filmmakers deciding to depict salacious behavior.

| Sep 26, 2008

If there's a Southern-gothic clich (oh, those snakes!) that writer-director Deborah Kampmeier misses, I don't know it.

Full Review | Original Score: .5/4 | Sep 26, 2008

A slow procession of degradation and suffering, Hounddog is like a tall glass of bitter iced tea.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 25, 2008

It's hard to take this wild mixture of sledgehammer symbolism, period Southern Gothic, race-conscious uplift and cautionary coming-of-age parable seriously, despite Fanning's remarkable poise.

| Original Score: C- | Sep 24, 2008

The only lesson is that if you're a child of the south, you better get yourself adopted by Yankees.

| Original Score: C | Sep 19, 2008

A handsomely produced but unintentionally risible film that mistakes high grotesquerie for high gothic.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 19, 2008

Kampmeier takes everything from the Flannery O'Connor school of Southern Gothic, tosses in cringe-worthy dialogue, and throws in not one but two horrible archetypes for good measure.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 19, 2008

The clichs are thick as the kudzu in 1956 Alabama.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 19, 2008

Rarely has there been a movie as misguided as Hounddog, which self-righteously indulges in exploitation while loudly decrying it.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 19, 2008

The problems that plague the movie land squarely with the writer, director and producer, Deborah Kampmeier, who has crafted a howler of a bad script, shows little affinity for working with actors and displays no visual sense behind the camera.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 19, 2008

A bewildering slice of southern gothic hokum, it suffers from a weak script, proving that old saw about actors being only as good as the lines they're given.

| Sep 19, 2008

Instead of embracing its pulpy nature, it aims for seriousness, then gives us cornpone performances, a lightning bolt that triggers a tractor's ejector seat, and a simple-minded view of saintly black folk who possess a dangerous blues.

| Original Score: 28/100 | Sep 19, 2008

The rape scene is disturbing, but it's not as surprising as the movie's unreconstructed racial attitudes or its deadpan cartoon portrayal of the lightning-struck, rattlesnake-bit, tick-infested white-trash denizens of the humid 1950s Deep South.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 19, 2008