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Average User Score: 7 (9 sources)

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jamesxboxgames

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I found this movie to be very well done. I really enjoyed this film. There were some times i just wanted to burn the film because it was very slow. But this movie is very depressing and very deep. I can apperciate these kinds of films. This movie...
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I found this movie to be very well done. I really enjoyed this film. There were some times i just wanted to burn the film because it was very slow. But this movie is very depressing and very deep. I can apperciate these kinds of films. This movie also had alot of interesting camera angles aswell as interesting styles of filming. Overall, I' really liked this movie and would only recomend this film to those of whom can appreciate something new and enjoy skateboarding.

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Posted jul 27, 2008 11:35 am pt

DarkManiaN_1979

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Wow I hated this film. The scenes dragged on forever and the plot didn't seem to move. I couldn't endure the entire thing because of the way the director drags out almost every scene so badly. There is some kind of a murder involved but that...
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Wow I hated this film. The scenes dragged on forever and the plot didn't seem to move. I couldn't endure the entire thing because of the way the director drags out almost every scene so badly. There is some kind of a murder involved but that doesn't surface much in between the bs long winded scenes.

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Posted apr 9, 2008 5:29 pm pt

• [+] Village Voice
  
  100
  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.

  by J. Hoberman | Read Full Review »
• [+] The New York Times
  
  100
  A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth.

  by Manohla Dargis | Read Full Review »
• [+] San Francisco Chronicle
  
  100
  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.

  by David Wiegand | Read Full Review »
• [+] Los Angeles Times
  
  100
  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.

  by Carina Chocano | Read Full Review »
• [+] The Onion (A.V. Club)
  
  91
  It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center.

  by Keith Phipps | Read Full Review »
• [+] Variety
  
  90
  Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth.

  by Todd McCarthy | Read Full Review »
• [+] New York Magazine
  
  90
  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.

  by David Edelstein | Read Full Review »
• [+] Wall Street Journal
  
  90
  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.

  by Joe Morgenstern | Read Full Review »
• [+] Austin Chronicle
  
  89
  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.

  by Marc Savlov | Read Full Review »
• [+] Chicago Tribune
  
  88
  "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.

  by Michael Phillips | Read Full Review »
• [+] The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  
  88
  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.

  by Jason McBride | Read Full Review »
• [+] Miami Herald
  
  88
  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.

  by Rene Rodriguez | Read Full Review »
• [+] Premiere
  
  88
  It's terribly strong -- in structural ingenuity, emotional pull, and particularly visual beauty.

  by Glenn Kenny | Read Full Review »
• [+] Rolling Stone
  
  88
  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.

  by Peter Travers | Read Full Review »
• [+] Entertainment Weekly
  
  83
  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.

  by Owen Gleiberman | Read Full Review »