Paranoid Park 2007

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: Van Sant has made his best film in many years. I didn't realize it until a second viewing. These things sometimes happen, especially if the first encounter was in the middle of a film festival. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: Elephant said much more about teenagers and said it better. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: In the space of 78 minutes, Mr. Van Sant and his cinematographer, the peerless Christopher Doyle, manage to suffuse that state with haunting sadness, ubiquitous danger, pulsing power and flickers of hope. Read more

Ted Fry, Seattle Times: Gus Van Sant's capper to a trilogy of experiments in elliptical narrative and lyrical structure is a masterful triumph of art, craft and empathy for the complicatedness of being a real teenager. Read more

Keith Phipps, AV Club: Through simple observation, Van Sant quietly lets viewers understand Nevins and feel the full force of his distress. Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: Paranoid Park, the new Gus Van Sant movie, is slight but fascinating. Read more

Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times: Youth and death meet again in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, a gorgeously stark, mesmerizingly elliptical story told in the same lyrical-prosaic style that has characterized his latest films. Read more

Amy Biancolli, Houston Chronicle: Regarding Paranoid Park as an elongated short rather than a feature helps a bit, because it's a miniature in spirit -- a small-format portrait of psychic malaise that just happens to last 84 minutes. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Paranoid Park becomes a portrait of the skate punk as repressed personality. The movie doesn't really go anywhere as a story, it simply unfolds. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Paranoid Park has the slightly glum insularity of minimalist fiction, but it's the first of Van Sant's blitzed-generation films in which a young man wakes up instead of shutting down. Read more

Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News: It's always exciting when a film that plays with cinematic language can squeeze in among the flotsam and jetsam of repetitive mediocrity. Read more

Amy Nicholson, I.E. Weekly: This isn't mallrat Crime and Punishment; it's Accident and Inertia, structured by Alex's attempt to capture his feelings in a journal.(He's more verbose than introspective.) Read more

Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly: Van Sant carries his ongoing experiments with image and sound design to new levels of sophistication. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant's mesmerizing new movie, melds the dreamy languor of his last few films with a page-turner of a plot. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant's current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson's finely tuned first-person 'young adult' novel. Read more

Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: The story's fractured structure -- and Christopher Doyle's dreamlike cinematography -- make for a striking mood piece. Read more

V.A. Musetto, New York Post: [An] intriguing, mind-altering skateboard elegy. Read more

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer: Intriguing and obliquely involving. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: Paranoid Park, while still off the beaten path, is less self-absorbed and pretentious than anything Van Sant has crafted since Finding Forrester. Read more

Jim Emerson, Chicago Sun-Times: Paranoid Park is graced with those peculiar Van Sant touches of discovery and absurdity, delightful because they're at once so right and so inscrutable. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: Van Sant wants his brief, deadpan, underpopulated scenes to feel more like real teen existence than the cliches of mainstream cinema. It's a worthy goal, but I'm afraid the actual effect is the opposite. Read more

David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle: For some of the way, it seems like a kind of skateboard whodunit. Soon enough, we understand it's much more than that. And by then, we know we're in for a ride to remember. Read more

Peter Schilling, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Alex goes to school, has a girlfriend, eats junk food ... and is almost as much of a zombie as anything George A. Romero has ever conjured up. Only less appealing. Read more

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Read more

Globe and Mail: Shows typical insight into the awkward years. Read more

Hank Sartin, Time Out: Read more

Melissa Anderson, Time Out: Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: A build-up of secrecy and anxiety are well-served by Van Sant's chopped-up narrative of the slow reveal, and again the director shows a keen eye for the rituals and worries of teenage life. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Variety: Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: Even something as modest as Paranoid Park manages to reflect Van Sant's greatest strengths as an artist: his seemingly limitless fluency with his chosen medium and his willingness to tell even the oldest stories in bold new ways. Read more