Avis Metacritic

This is as dark as Zwigoff has gotten - arguably even darker than "Bad Santa." And, while it's legitimate to label Art School Confidential as a "comedy," the movie is more clever than it is funny.

Art School Confidential is replete with humorous detail--in that respect, the student art projects are particularly fine--but it's the attitude that rules.

Art School Confidential reaches its dementedly brilliant peak in the company of Jim Broadbent.

Zwigoff has a rich comic gallery of pretentious boobs to lampoon. But his satirical target just seems too easy this time around: It's hard to spoof institutions that already veer so close to self-parody.

Art School Confidential mostly just makes you feel bad - period. It puts you in a foul mood and leaves you there.

With an "Animal House"-ish deportment, Art School likely will entertain a sophomoric audience and etch some winning college-kid figures, but art house audiences will be disappointed by its paint-by-numbers storytelling.

Despite a soulful leading performance from Max Minghella, pic feels insubstantial, echoing without equaling both the coolly ironic edge and heart of "Ghost World" and the incisive art-world outsider portrait of the director's docu feature, "Crumb."

We still love you, Terry. Happens to the best of us. But, man, what a stinky load. Someone get the hose.

Insistently sullen, nihilistic, and successful to the point of smugness at transmitting buzzkill, Art School Confidential is the second collaboration between art-house cartoonist Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff.

Zwigoff doesn't get the tone right, and the picture goes from reasonably amusing (if crude) to puzzling to boring to (when a campus strangler enters the picture) hateful.