Your Friends ... Neighbours

If you're actively looking for reasons to dislike this movie, there's no shortage of them, but if you're prepared to roll with it and take it on its own terms, you'll be rewarded richly in terms of entertainment.

The second feature from Neil Labute (In The Company of Men), Your Friends is a viciously funny chronicle of three men, three women, their sex lives and their amazing capacity for double-crosses and deceptions.

Jerry (Ben Stiller) is an intellectually-inclined acting teacher locked in a stunningly unaffectionate relationship with Terri (Catherine Keener), a hate-filled, cold-hearted bitch-from-hell who finds that any kind of conversation in mid-intercourse kills it for her - *Fucking is fucking; it's not a time for sharing*. Meanwhile, macho-meathead Barry (Aaron Eckhart, perversely the most likeable of the bunch in spite of his Militia-Man looks) is locked in a sexless relationship with frigid wife Mary, who is played with great complexity and mystery by NYPD Blue's Amy Brenneman. Rounding off the group are Nastassia Kinski (under-used as a lesbian seductress) and Jason Patric, who displays astonishing reserves of untapped talent in a brilliantly-written role as a hateful misogynist (Keener's mirror image) who single-handedly rewrites and modernises the book on How To Be A Complete Bastard.

Over the course of a highly intriguing narrative, the characters fuck one another's lives up with magnificent results, while Labute's script deserves some sort of Oscar for sadistic humour, deliberately careering towards the Worst-Case-Scenario at every available opportunity, and always finding the target.

I think I preferred This Year's Love, but Your Friends is still downright essential viewing for anyone not completely repelled by the nightmare vision of human relationships it brings so chillingly to life.