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Paranoid Park
Universal acclaim
Based on 27 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 45 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Blake Nelson (novel)
Gus Van Sant
Directed by: Gus Van Sant
Release Date:
Theatrical: March 7, 2008
DVD: October 7, 2008
Running Time: 90 minutes, Color
Origin: France / USA
Summary
RATING: R for some disturbing images, language and sexual content
Starring Gabe Nevins, Daniel Liu, Taylor Momsen, Jake Miller, and Lauren McKinney
An unsolved murder at Portland's infamous Paranoid Park brings detectives to a local high school, propelling a young skater into a moral odyssey in which he must not only deal with the pain and disconnect of adolescence but also the consequences of his own actions. As director of "My Own Private Idaho", "Good Will Hunting", "To Die For", and "Elephant", Gus Van Sant has created some of the most memorable works about youth ever committed to film. At the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, he was awarded the 60th Anniversary Prize for Paranoid Park, which is largely considered one of his finest films. (IFC First Take)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Drugstore Cowboy Elephant Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Finding Forrester Gerry Good Will Hunting Last Days Mala Noche (re-release) Milk My Own Private Idaho Psycho To Die For
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Village Voice J. Hoberman
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.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle David Wiegand
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 Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
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 Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
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.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
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 Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
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.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
“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.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jason McBride
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.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
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.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
It's terribly strong -- in structural ingenuity, emotional pull, and particularly visual beauty.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
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 Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
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 Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
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 Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
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 Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Van Sant has been quoted in recent media reports as being done with the type of filmmaking that these four movies represent. If that's true, then Paranoid Park is a fine summation of what he learned from making them.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
It's all confusing, woozy and slightly stoned, and feels very much like adolescence.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
The story's fractured structure - and Christopher Doyle's dreamlike cinematography - make for a striking mood piece.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Paranoid Park is a rare breed: a movie about teenagers in which the characters talk like real teenagers, act like real teenagers, and are played by real teenagers.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
The fluid film cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, intercut with grainy Super-8 shots of park regulars, tracks the skaters in their free-flying, free-styling and free-falling grace. In these privileged moments, the film is close to transcendence, defying time, space and gravity.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Rick Kisonak
The chief triumph here, it seems to me though, is one of style over substance. The disaffected kids who shuffle through its universe have nothing to say, nothing to tell us. I’m not sure the movie has a whole lot more.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
If Paranoid Park is mainly an accumulation of the signs and symbols and images inside Van Sant's own head, that's artistically legitimate. When he makes a feeble effort to connect Alex's plight to the Iraq war and the cultural climate of Bush-era America, I just don't buy it.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Paranoid Park is a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
There's some striking camerawork by Christopher Doyle (in 35-millimeter) and Rain Kathy Li (in Super-8), though this doesn't alter the overall feeling of random, nihilistic drift.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.2 (out of 10) based on 45 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Dan K gave it a9:
I haven't seen this many split reviews since There Will be Blood. Instead of saying, "this movie sucks," how about, "I didn't like this movie." Or, better yet, aren't people interested in why critics loved this movie when so many viewers did not? It seems a little indulgent and egocentric to give the final word on a movie (film critics are paid to do this). This story was filmed in slow motion to reflect how the teen was feeling at the moment. His entire world was turned up side down (much like the skateboarders in mid-flight) after the traumatic incident, and he was trying to piece it all together. Has anyone ever had a traumatic moment in your life where everything seemed to move in slow motion? When you felt you couldn't think, and everything was floating in space? That was the effect Van Sant was going for. I personally appreciated this movie because it was daring enough to take its time. This film reminded me of foreign classics like L'avventura and I Vitelloni, where the journey of the character is most important, even more so than the plot. Modern audiences like a neatly wrapped up story, which is fine. It is just not as challenging nor does it make the audience think as much. This film leaves a lot to be discussed, such as what should the boy have done? What will happen to him? What should happen to him? The slow camera work allows us to feel the trauma that he is feeling, not just see it. The fact that the film takes its time allows the audience to get to know the characters more (if the audience member does not allow himself or herself to get annoyed by the slow-moving plot). This film is not for everyone. For those who like mainstream movies, stick to what you know you will like. Don't waste your time listening to critics because you don't like the same things. Ask your friends for advice instead. For those who watch films and cannot figure out why a critic liked the film so much, you don't have to like the film, but try thinking about it empathetically instead of simply bashing something that you just don't understand.
Erik W gave it a1:
This movie was trying way to hard. Just because 50% of it was in slo-mo doesn't make it interesting and doesn't save the horrendous acting. Ultimately an unresolved waste of time.
Jamie J. gave it an8:
Artful and inspiring. DEFINITELY not for the impatient. This movie is captivating in it's own way and has a pleasant simplicity to it.
Sean S. gave it a2:
In addition to the worst of Gus Van Sant's masturbatory indulgences, "Paranoid Park" also features a shockingly inept cast, including two girls who can't stop looking at the camera. I don't care that these kids were, with the exception of Taylor Momsen, untrained amateurs -- after all, look at what Steven Soderbergh accomplished under similar circumstances with "Bubble." One can hardly call "Paranoid Park" a movie; it's more like a personal tone poem that Van Sant made for himself, and no one else. I wish he would have kept it private. Its only saving grace is the gorgeous photography by Christopher Doyle.
David C gave it a0:
If you like scenes in slow motion walking boy are you in for a treat because this movie has lots of it. Not to be typecast, it also has slow motion skateboarding and various other slow motion activities. Critics for some reason love Van Sant, you won’t, just trust me on this. This is not a great film and don’t let any of the über-intellectuals tell you otherwise. Critics love it and you’ll hate it.
Alex H. gave it a9:
What most teens are looking for is action in a movie. That probably explains the bad reviews in earlier comments stating that this gripper is boring. This, to me, one of best of year.
Aaron J. gave it a1:
The gushing reviews are as pretentious and self-satisfied as this snoozer of a movie. Very little happens, which in of itself is not a problem in a great film (Last Year at Marienbad), but this is not a great film. In spite of a couple of gripping scenes directly related to the plot, this is merely a collection of slow-motion footage designed to fill time to approach a full-feature length film. My wife and I kept lookin at each other, rolling our eyes, saying "here we go, another slow motion scene of the protagonist dreamily walking down a hallway"... A rip-off. Avoid it unless you are intrigued by pretentious self-conscious movies.
