Although My Friend Dahmer does not resolve the impossible question of 'nature vs nurture', it approaches it with a humanity that is too often missing from such stories.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 3, 2018

Isn't there something pathological about the way we privilege the pathological? If you can stomach the focus of My Friend Dahmer, you'll find this rewarding.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 9, 2018

My Friend Dahmer is nonetheless a sad film about squandered opportunity. Everybody is losing out in this grim, claustrophobic version of the late 1970s.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2018

It makes for something that ends up being sadder, weirder, more boring - but more convincing - than the average serial killer movie.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 3, 2018

The whole assembly kit of Jeffrey Dahmer's dysfunction is laid out, and we can easily see how it all clicks together. The film might have risked more empathy for him, if that weren't the one thing he so signally lacked himself.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 1, 2018

There's a hint of retrospective guilt here and you could question Backderf's morals, and by extension those of Meyers, for profiting from telling a murderer's origin story.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 1, 2018

Ross Lynch is eerily good as Dahmer, like a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman - stolidly silent, heavy-footed, incubating his resentments.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 31, 2018

Lynch's opaque performance deliberately keeps you at a distance and avoids any easy answers.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 31, 2018

Films like My Friend Dahmer heighten the mystery rather than explaining it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 30, 2018

An eerily hypnotic film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 30, 2018

A small, slight window into a mixed-up soul, this is more intriguing than engaging. Its restraint, though, is admirable, resulting in a mood-piece with an ongoing sense of unease.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 30, 2018

Knowing what we know now about Dahmer's future, this is pretty chilling stuff.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 25, 2018

Meyers makes "My Friend Dahmer" a convincing high school drama, but his portrait of the serial killer as a young man telegraphs Dahmer's future all too clearly.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 16, 2017

My Friend Dahmer is at its most provocative when it considers this dynamic between the exploiters and the exploited. In making Dahmer feel like a freak, did the boys push him over the edge into a murderous contempt for all people?

| Nov 16, 2017

Which came first, bullies or dead animals in jars? "Friend" does not say, nor is there a clear link between the discord in Jeff's home and his behavior.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 16, 2017

It seeks not to excuse Dahmer but rather to illuminate his sociopathy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 9, 2017

A morbidly fascinating peek behind the blood-stained curtains.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 9, 2017

A warped wonder of a movie about a cannibalistic serial killer's awkward teenage years-it takes twisted to areas few have investigated.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 6, 2017

Writer-director Marc Meyers turns Backderf's celebrated book into an absorbing, dramatized portrait of casual cruelty and teenage desperation, equal parts The Virgin Suicides and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 3, 2017

More than a week after watching writer-director Marc Meyers' My Friend Dahmer, I'm still trying to figure out who exactly the film is meant for and why on earth it was made.

| Original Score: C- | Nov 3, 2017