Your Friends & Neighbors

If you didn't go for the caustic analysis of male insecurity and cruelty in Neil LaBute's previous film, In the Company of Men, you'll probably hate this one. It's a similarly cold, detached study of human foibles as exemplified by the sordid sexual shenanigans of three friends and their partners, but despite the strong performances, with Keener excelling as always, the slightly theatrical framing and narrative repetitions and the gloating emphasis on deviousness, weakness and self-obsession not only suggest that the writer/director may just have only one idea in his head, but that he may be genuinely misanthropic.