Critic Reviews

Feels a bit like a missed opportunity. It's too bad the motion picture as a whole isn't as quirky and clever as its double-edged title.

With intermittently amusing glee, writer-director Ryan Shiraki's tyro film, Freshman Orientation, frolics through the political minefields of a typical college campus.

It isn’t particularly funny. Mocking lesbians for bad bongo-beating poetry, for instance, just ain’t fresh, interesting or even especially offensive.

An uneven coming-of-age comedy.

Crude and cheerfully sophomoric teen sex comedy.

On one level, a stereotypical mash of Greek cruelty, queer poetry slams and rabid activist rhetoric. But beneath the tired crudeness and college-romp clichés, the movie is gently perceptive about the malleable nature of sexuality and the barriers we construct to hide our confusion.

Freshman Orientation is not incompetently made. Nor is it badly acted. But there’s not a fresh idea in it, and everyone on screen seems to be in a different comedy.

This schizoid college comedy veers between gross-out humor and earnest coming-of-age drama.

First-time writer-director Ryan Shiraki's crude, gross comedy of campus sexual errors might push boundaries better were it not so painfully unfunny.