I embraced what Van Sant achieved with his earlier three films, I just can’t feel quite that same enthusiasm for this one, even though it’s an extremely well-made film.
Comment
03/19/08
Paranoid Park (2008)
75
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:109
Fresh:82
Rotten:27
Average Rating:6.8/10
Consensus: Director Gus Van Sant once again superbly captures the ins and outs of teenage life in Paranoid Park, a quietly devastating portrait of a young man living with guilt and anxiety.
Reviews for Paranoid Park
Top CriticGus Van Sant's interest in teenage angst continues here (for more, see Last Days and Elephant), but with an even greater sense of artistic abandon. He's no David Lynch, though, and the result of the abandon just seems silly
03/01/08
Top CriticShows typical insight into the awkward years.
09/06/07
The film is told in bursts of flashback, flash forward and even flash sideways all framed in a dream-world sense. The slow-motion theatrics of skater tricks are particularly beautiful and almost a flight from the reality of the cruel teen years.
03/15/08
Like Elephant, it's a triumph of style and mood over story.
03/13/08
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.
03/20/08
Top CriticAs fragmented and disordered as the writings in Alex's notebook, Paranoid Park is a moody, somewhat otherworldly study of the confusion, alienation and furtive secrecy of adolescence
12/24/07
If you are planning to shoot a visual poem, there is no one better to have on hand than cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Doyle knows how to find seduction and romance anywhere.
03/26/08
There are certain times in a filmmaker's career when everything comes together in a kind of perfect storm ... For Gus Van Sant, Paranoid Park is that film.
03/20/08
Stands at the midway point in its auteur's recent filmography, displaying both the strengths and weaknesses of his recent stylistic choices.
03/14/08
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.
03/14/08
Top CriticIntriguing and obliquely involving.
03/21/08
The one facet that separates Paranoid Park from the director's previous work is the way Van Sant uses all the talents in his arsenal to create something that few films have ever attempted to portray: the manic assemblage of teenage life.
03/06/08
[The narrative is] as speedy and graceful as the skateboarders it lingers over in Paranoid Park, where their daredevil moves are often shot in dreamily beautiful slow motion.
03/21/08
It's always exciting when a film that plays with cinematic language can squeeze in among the flotsam and jetsam of repetitive mediocrity.
03/14/08
The film closes with still more images of skaters, these reflected in wide-angly convex mirrors, beautiful and frightening and seductive.
03/21/08
Van Sant’s low-key, experimental high-school drama is an affecting rites-of-passage tale, told with bold style and quiet integrity.
12/26/07
Top CriticA 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.
12/28/07
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.
03/03/08
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.
03/14/08
Latest News for Paranoid Park
December 14, 2008:
Boston Film Critics Honor Slumdog, WALL-E
The hardware won't be handed out until February 8, but the winners of this year's Boston Society of Film Critics Awards have been announced -- and they're all listed right here. More...
April 07, 2008:
Paranoid Park: Re-shaping the skater soundtrack 
In the past few weeks, I'm seeing skaters with a new glow in my eyes - a kind of sparkle of the special - as they slalom down Sunset sidewalks, click-clacking over cracks and... More...
March 06, 2008:
Critics Consensus: 10,000 B.C. is Primitive; Bank Gets the Job Done
This week at the movies, we've got prehistoric passion (10,000 B.C., starring Steven Strait and Camilla Belle), travel travails (College Road Trip, starring Maritn Lawrence and... More...
January 26, 2008:
Trailer & Poster review
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