Paranoid Park
IFC Films | Release Date: March 7, 2008 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
84
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 27 Critic Reviews
Positive:
23
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla Dargis
A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
It's a new and inspired vision of a familiar state of being -- teenage anomie amidst the crumbling wreckage of a middle-class American family. 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 full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleDavid Wiegand
Appropriately structured like a ride on skateboard: It swoops back and forth in time, hovers in midair, twists back on itself over and over again, then rolls into silence. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesCarina Chocano
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 full review
100
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
Van Sant is such an assured filmmaker that Paranoid Park is almost inescapably absorbing; he has found a particularly engaging leading man in Miller, whose expressive, even painterly face goes from blank to angelic in the blink of a long-lashed eye. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubKeith Phipps
It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center. Read full review
90
VarietyTodd McCarthy
Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
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 full review
89
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
Paranoid Park shows the Portland-based director to be working at the pinnacle of his art in every frame, in every composition. It's breathtaking, heartbreaking, tragic, gorgeous, and true all at the same time. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter Travers
The film's sound design, sampling Beethoven and Nino Rota, among others, links up with visual miracles performed by Rain Kathy Li and Wong Kar-Wai's noted cinematographer, Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love), to take us inside Alex's head. The result, a defiant slap at slick Hollywood formula, is mesmerizing. Read full review
88
PremiereGlenn Kenny
It's terribly strong -- in structural ingenuity, emotional pull, and particularly visual beauty. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
“Elephant” may have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but it really didn’t have anything to say about anything. Modest and artful, Paranoid Park says a great deal. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Jason McBride
It might seem, from 2002's "Gerry" to his ersatz Kurt Cobain biopic, "Last Days," that Gus Van Sant has been making the same movie: an enigmatic and poetic paean to (teenaged) male beauty, disaffection and inscrutability. Read full review
88
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
The story of Paranoid Park may center on an extreme and unusual case, but it's Van Sant's understanding of -- and compassion for -- the hell of growing up that makes the film such a profound and lasting pleasure. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
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 full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
In Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant enters the world of high school kids just as he did in "Elephant," achieving this time a much sharper, more focused portrait of how these rapidly maturing young people act, think, speak and behave. Read full review
75
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
It's all confusing, woozy and slightly stoned, and feels very much like adolescence. Read full review
75
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
The story's fractured structure - and Christopher Doyle's dreamlike cinematography - make for a striking mood piece. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
Slight but fascinating. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
Paranoid Park is a rare breed: a movie about teenagers in which the characters talk like real teenagers, act like real teenagers, and are played by real teenagers. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
Van Sant has been quoted in recent media reports as being done with the type of filmmaking that these four movies represent. If that's true, then Paranoid Park is a fine summation of what he learned from making them. Read full review
63
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
The fluid film cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, intercut with grainy Super-8 shots of park regulars, tracks the skaters in their free-flying, free-styling and free-falling grace. In these privileged moments, the film is close to transcendence, defying time, space and gravity. Read full review
60
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
If Paranoid Park is mainly an accumulation of the signs and symbols and images inside Van Sant's own head, that's artistically legitimate. When he makes a feeble effort to connect Alex's plight to the Iraq war and the cultural climate of Bush-era America, I just don't buy it. Read full review
60
Film ThreatRick Kisonak
The chief triumph here, it seems to me though, is one of style over substance. The disaffected kids who shuffle through its universe have nothing to say, nothing to tell us. I’m not sure the movie has a whole lot more. Read full review
58
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
Paranoid Park is a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
There's some striking camerawork by Christopher Doyle (in 35-millimeter) and Rain Kathy Li (in Super-8), though this doesn't alter the overall feeling of random, nihilistic drift. Read full review
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