New Best Friend

Feels like "Cruel Intentions" but spicier. Mia Kirshner was the reason for me to watch the movie. I'm in lust with her. She's physically perfect. Her sexy acting in this movie is great. She even has a steamy but brief sex scene. I got all the Mia I wanted.

I terms of plot, it's very decent. It's one of those teen intriguing thrillers that deals with revenge, envy, sex, etc. The things you are used to live in high school. Heck, even a cop gets in the middle.

Taye Digss's accent has become some sort of cult classic.

I found this movie to be morbid but interesting. That's enough to fit in the teenage 2000's cinema. Don't expect a great plot but it should please your hunger for the "Cruel Intentions" type of movies.

Alicia Campbell is a good girl. Coming from a poor family this sweet, hard-working girl is focused on her education, determined to make something of her life. Hadley Ashton is a bad girl. Coming from a rich family this cold, bitchy girl doesn't want to work, she expects to have life handed to her on a silver platter. The two girls attend one of those colleges where the college runs the town. The college president makes this perfectly clear when the acting sheriff turns up on campus to investigate how sweet little Alicia ended up comatose in a hospital bed, fighting for her life. The president makes it very clear that he expects there to be no actual investigating done in this investigation. But Sheriff Artie Bonner keeps digging.

The movie unfolds largely in flashbacks as we see the oh-so-innocent Alicia lose her innocence which leads to her potentially losing her life. She and Hadley are paired up on a school project. Alicia is a social nobody, Hadley is one of the campus queens. Hadley and her rich, snotty friends take Alicia under their wing. Alicia starts to change. Not so innocent after all perhaps. Drugs and sex, and more drugs and more sex and what exactly has Alicia gotten herself into? Eventually she overdoses on cocaine. Accident? Hadley and her friends would like you to believe that. The college president would definitely like you to believe that. The sheriff does not believe that.

The movie sets Hadley and her two main cohorts, Sidney and Julianne, up as potential suspects, giving them each motivations for perhaps wanting to be rid of Alicia. Some other fringe characters get involved too but the focus is clearly on this gang of three. Truth be told this is not a particularly mysterious mystery. Those watching will probably put all the pieces of the puzzle together long before the sheriff does. The hint of obviousness drains away some of the drama but that doesn't necessarily make New Best Friend a bad movie. It's far from the greatest thing you'll ever see but it's reasonably compelling. Trashy but entertainingly so. Mia Kirshner turns in a very good performance in playing Alicia. The character evolves, not necessarily for the best, and Kirshner nails the transformation. You believe her as the sweet, innocent girl we first meet. And you believe her as the girl who ultimately proves to be something else entirely. The rest of the cast is not quite up to Kirshner's standard. Meredith Monroe is a little flat in playing ice queen Hadley, neither Dominique Swain nor Rachel True are particularly memorable in playing our other two would-be murderesses. And playing the sheriff Taye Diggs just appears to be going through the motions. A flawed movie to be sure but there are enough good things here, Kirshner most notably, to make it a decent viewing experience. Not a movie you'd regret missing if you didn't see it. But not a movie you'd regret seeing if you did.

I would have to disagree on most of the user comments on this movie. Most insist it is a piece of trash, not worth viewing. And yes perhaps they're right about the trashy part but in my humble opinion, New Best Friend is in the same kind of league as 90210 - entertaining trash that as much as we hate to admit it, we actually find ourselves engrossed in.

Yes, the story is unoriginal and the script poor but the performances by the key actors are good enough to keep viewers interested. Mia Kirsher (Exotica, The Crow:City of Angels) delivers a stellar performance despite the bad material she was given to work with. An actress of her calibre should be choosing better parts in significantly better movies but I'm willing to forgive her for making one bad decision (but that's only because personally I didn't find New Best Friend a complete waste of my time). Meridith Monroe, Dominique Swain and Rachel True are all effective in their roles however one bad performance has to come from Taye Diggs as the officer in charge of investigating Alicia's (Kirsher) overdose which has suspicious circumstances. Diggs usually turns in fine performances but in New Best Friend he just looks bored. Perhaps that's due to the lack of good material he had to work with.

Overall I found New Best Friend to be an entertaining movie. Sure there was a lot of things wrong with it and it certainly won't go down as one of my favourite films of the year but it succeeds for what it is - great trash!

"New Best Friend" is a pretty decent film. I would have to disagree with the other comments on this about it. I really enjoyed watching this film. I will admit that I rented it because of the gils in the film, mainly Mia Kirshner and Dominique Swain. But I was surprised when I found that the movie was not bad at all. The film stars Kirshner, Swain, Rachel True and Meredith Monroe. Kirshner playes the "outcast" at their college, and the other three girls are the pretty, popular and party girls. When Monroe and Kirshner's characters are partnered up together to work on a project, Monrose's character gets more than she thought she would. The three "pretty" girls take Kirshner's character under their wings and give her a make-over both physically and mentally. But when Kirshner's character is more than she seems, the other girls get a whole different girl. The storyline to this film is pretty basic, ugly girl turns pretty, then turns out evil. But the film direction is great and there are some pretty good twists and turns to the plot line. Great performances by Kirshner (as usual), Swain and True. I wasn't expecting Monroe to give a good performance and I was right. She can't really portray the character well, and her's was the only bad performance in this film. All in all, a pretty good film. ****/out of 5 p.s. there is a GREAT sex scene between Swain and Kirshner that will get any guy excited and if you like girl on girl, rent this movie! you won't be disapointed by that part.

This film may be a bit derivative of the two titles I hint at in my one-line summary, but it by no means a truly bad film. It's a tad misdirected, somewhat dragged out and definitely not all-around well-acted, but it is not bad movie. I won't claim I watched this for any other reason than the fact that it features some of the hottest young actresses in newer times, but I will make a point of what happened when I sat down to watch it. I didn't take my eyes off the screen. I didn't get up for a minute or two, and I never really felt like I was wasting time by watching it. For a while, the last couple of weeks, I have had trouble finding a film that really got my attention and kept it. Not since watching Requiem For a Dream have I been following a film so intensely. I didn't want to miss a thing watching this movie, and that says a lot, considering my almost ADD-like short attention span. The plot is not particularly original, but it is interesting. The pacing is mostly good, but around the middle and near the end, it seems to slow down, in order to drag out the material in order to reach the minimum limit for the length of a feature film, something that really hurts the film(it probably should have been a short... or maybe there should have been written more story or more characters). The acting isn't all good, but the four leads give good performances(even Meredith Monroe of Dawson's Creek fame... who saw that coming?). The twists and plot developments are interesting, but the mystery of who committed the crime is almost impossible to solve for the viewer until the very end, where it's revealed. Even worse, it makes said mystery seem very simple, since it turned out to be the very person I suspected from the very beginning. The non-linear time-line works fairly well, but it does get somewhat confusing in several parts, because it's not perfectly clear if we're seeing a flashback or something that goes on 'right now'. There is a fair amount of sex and drug use in this film, so it's not for the easily offended or the faint of heart. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I believe most people will too, if they give it a chance. I recommend this to fans of the genre, and I urge anyone watching it to give it a fair chance to win you over. It's uneven, but it's not a bad film. 6/10