Paranoid Park Critic Reviews
Metascore®:
Based upon 12 Critic ReviewsHighest Rated
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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 the full review
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 the full review
A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth.Read the full review
It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center.Read the full review
Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth.Read the full review
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 the full review
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 the full review
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 the full review
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 the full review
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 the full review
