Crime + Punishment in Suburbia

Very watchable. A movie for the disaffected, in league with Splendor in the Grass, Rebel Without a Cause, Ghost World, and the many other high-school nostalgia movies about coming of age and not fitting into society. Yes, the view is from high school, but the issues are deep and mature. It is not brilliant writing but it works, without any too-slow sections. And the acting? Well, Ellen Barkin is in it (she should never have married the billionaire - she should have just kept on acting. Please tell her for me. - arjuna).

For Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky) fans, this is indeed something special. It contains so many reflections of that original masterpiece: from the trivial ("suburbia" sounds like "siberia") to the intriguing: the nihilistic existentialist murder of the old woman next door as an intellectual experiment and the unavoidable subsequent guilt and exile from the city to nowheresville, the way that guilt marks you, the strong undercurrent of faith in God (yes, this movie shows faith in God in a realistic way!) and its liberating power, the isolation and bleakness of siberia/suburbia, and, perhaps the most Dostoyevsky-like of them all, dream sequences brilliant and absolutely engaging in their unexpected improvisations.