Art School Confidential Critic Reviews

There is a wise and understanding teacher on the faculty, played by Anjelica Huston. Defending the work of Dead White Males, she sensibly observes that when they did their best work "they weren't dead yet."Read the full review

This is as dark as Zwigoff has gotten - arguably even darker than "Bad Santa." And, while it's legitimate to label Art School Confidential as a "comedy," the movie is more clever than it is funny.Read the full review

If a more elegant and succinct explanation of what compels some people to go to art school has ever been filmed, I haven't seen it.Read the full review

Enjoyable and reprises the same dyspeptic attitude that infused "Ghost World," but ultimately it lacks its predecessor's originality and humanity.Read the full review

Zwigoff has a rich comic gallery of pretentious boobs to lampoon. But his satirical target just seems too easy this time around: It's hard to spoof institutions that already veer so close to self-parody.Read the full review

Misanthropy can be incredibly entertaining, so long as that hatred draws blood. But that extra percentage point of venom has skewed Clowes and Zwigoff's aim.Read the full review

With an "Animal House"-ish deportment, Art School likely will entertain a sophomoric audience and etch some winning college-kid figures, but art house audiences will be disappointed by its paint-by-numbers storytelling.Read the full review

Art School Confidential exudes confidence as long as it is satirizing a questionable, at least according to Clowes, institution of higher learning. But the film loses its way with multiple subplots, becoming a hodgepodge that isn't particularly hard to follow, but, far worse, provides no compelling reason to bother.Read the full review

Despite a soulful leading performance from Max Minghella, pic feels insubstantial, echoing without equaling both the coolly ironic edge and heart of "Ghost World" and the incisive art-world outsider portrait of the director's docu feature, "Crumb."Read the full review