Hick

You can't help but feel awful for Luli, despite her hard exterior. She's had to craft that shell for years, living with her horrible parents. Clearly, she deserves better. But HICK, director Derick Martini's take on her hard-scrabble life, is curiously devoid of compassion and heart, even if it's sprinkled with moments when we see Luli, like a sunflower, reaching for the proverbial sun despite the darkness around her. That's because Martini has littered her world with so much desperation, brutality, and sadness that we don't quite get why she still has it in her to fight for survival. Hick is too bleak, too cold, too late to bring a shot of joy into Luli's life -- and to the viewer's experience of the movie, for that matter -- that you have to wonder whether the ending is actually feasible.

The performances, however, are very strong, especially Moretz's; she sometimes appears to truly be struggling to make sense of the horror of it all. Lively does fine with her role, but many shades of it were seen before in her role in The Town. And Redmayne's Eddie is simply a creep; he makes your skin crawl, making certain scenes all the more uncomfortable.