American Teen Critic Reviews
Metascore®:
Based upon 13 Critic ReviewsHighest Rated
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Shows how a documentary can be as moving and suspenseful as the best narrative feature.Read the full review
The players are timelessly familiar in American Teen, too. But filmmaker Nanette Burstein tells their stories with a distinctly 21st-century pop and audacity.Read the full review
Though it's compelling enough as soap opera, American Teen digs deeply into why kids grudgingly accept the roles they've been given and the brutal consequences that come with straying outside the lines.Read the full review
Parents are another matter. Almost to a man and woman they lay expectations on their children that ignore who those children are.Read the full review
American Teen isn't as penetrating or obviously realistic as her "On the Ropes," but Burstein has achieved an engrossing film.Read the full review
Though it could work as effectively as a television vehicle, American Teen is revealing, funny and involving.Read the full review
Reality tv, welcome to the multiplex. If "The Hills" went back to high school and developed wit, perception and a conscience, it might play something like Nanette Burstein's wallop of a doc.Read the full review
What makes Nanette Burstein's movie so powerful is its uncanny sense of familiarity.Read the full review
The movie is entertaining on a superficial level, but there's little beneath the surface.Read the full review
This is the kind of movie the people in it might have made, which means that its revelatory power as an investigation of teenage life in America is limited.Read the full review
