Hounddog: Critic Reviews

Under the circumstances, Fanning is remarkably collected and even dignified. As for the rest of the gang, they ought to be returned to sender.

This overripe tale of innocence lost has become one of notoriety found.

The symbolism [is] clobbering.

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

Wright Penn evidently helped get the film financed, but her big scenes feel shoehorned in. This is Dakota Fanning's film.

Dakota Fanning takes an impressive step forward in her career, but that's about the only good thing about Hounddog.

Only Fanning's emotional honesty makes Hounddog watchable.

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.

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

Ms. Fanning's performance alone makes Hounddog worth seeing in this age of child Duses.

Hounddog is an indigestible gumbo of Southern Gothic ingredients seasoned with snake oil, biblical hash and thoroughly unpalatable spice.

The cliches are thick as the kudzu in 1956 Alabama.

Seriously, I'm astonished that anybody would try to pass this movie off as artistically or socially meaningful in 2007.

Take away the 'hound' part of the title and you have an appropriate descriptor of this production.

Fanning projects a strange mix of innocence and awareness. The triumph of her performance is her ability to turn it on and off in the same scene, sometimes even in the same shot.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The latest wallow in regional cliche and stereotype.