Don't listen to the negative reviews

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Confused and confusing who-dun-it filmed in a relentlessly jerky TV style with at least 95% close-ups that make it even more difficult to follow the action. Just about everyone in the whole cast of about ninety people receive a close-up. The viewer has no idea whether they are important to the plot or not. Only the investigator himself and the headmaster – in a much smaller role – make any impression. Even the victim herself is not firmly delineated. Nor are her friends – if they are "friends"! It's impossible to tell who is who! Who are the "good" people and who are the rotten apples? And at the end of the movie, we are just left in a state of complete confusion. In fact, we are even more confused than we were while the plot was jerkily unfolding. Who was the best friend of who? As far as the principle plot and all the sub-plots were concerned, virtually nothing was explained, nothing was made clear. The only plot item that was made quite emphatically was the small and rather insignificant point that the racist headmaster didn't cotton to the sheriff. As a result, the headmaster sought to have the sheriff sacked, and possibly did so – but even this was not made crystal clear!

Terrible, really. I caught this on HBO. Maybe on the big screen it would have been worse. Lousy acting, bad editing, worse direction, erratic plot, this "D" movie had it all. It was simply painful. I nominate this movie for top ten worst of all time. Run, run like your hair is on fire. Seriously. I've seen worse movies like "Creeping Terror" which was shot with a single camera and a single light source in many scenes. Or the classic "Plan 9 From Outer Space". What those two films had was "camp" value as a virtue of being awful. "New Best Friend" can't even rise to the "camp" level. There are no redeeming features, the master and all copies should be destroyed immediately for the betterment of mankind.

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

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!