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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

67
$9.99
75
24 City
66
Adoration
74
Afghan Star
48
Alien Trespass
56
American Violet
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Away We Go
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Beaches of Agnes, The
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Big Man Japan
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Big Shot-Caller, The
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Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
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Brothers Bloom, The
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Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
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Call of the Wild
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Cheri
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Cherry Blossoms
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Easy Virtue
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End of the Line, The
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Every Little Step
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Examined Life
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Food, Inc.
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Gigantic
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Girl from Monaco, The
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Girlfriend Experience, The
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Gomorrah
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Goodbye Solo
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Great Buck Howard, The
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Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
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Hurt Locker, The
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Julia
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Lemon Tree
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Limits of Control, The
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Little Ashes
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Lymelife
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Management
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Merry Gentleman, The
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Moon
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New York
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Not Forgotten
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O'Horten
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Outrage
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Paris 36
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Pontypool
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Pressure Cooker
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Quiet Chaos
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Revanche
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Rudo y Cursi
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Seraphine
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Sex Positive
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Shall We Kiss?
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Sin Nombre
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Sleep Dealer
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Song of Sparrows, The
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Stoning of Soraya M., The
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Sugar
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Summer Hours
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Sunshine Cleaning
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Surveillance
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Tennessee
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Tetro
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Tokyo Sonata
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Tokyo!
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Tony Manero
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Two Lovers
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U2 3D
60
Under Our Skin
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Unmistaken Child
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Valentino: The Last Emperor
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What Goes Up
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Whatever Works
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Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
91
Hurt Locker, The
89
Goodbye Solo
88
Tulpan
87
Gomorrah
86
Seraphine
84
Summer Hours
83
U2 3D
83
Revanche
83
Tyson
82
Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
82
Sugar
82
Hunger
82
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
81
Il Divo
81
Beaches of Agnes, The
80
Food, Inc.
80
Tokyo Sonata
79
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
78
Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
78
O'Horten
77
Every Little Step
77
Sin Nombre
75
24 City
74
Treeless Mountain
74
Afghan Star
74
Two Lovers
74
Song of Sparrows, The
74
Lemon Tree
71
Pressure Cooker
71
Jerichow
70
Shall We Kiss?
70
Tony Manero
70
End of the Line, The
69
Valentino: The Last Emperor
69
Unmistaken Child
67
$9.99
67
Rudo y Cursi
67
Girlfriend Experience, The
66
Adoration
66
Moon
65
Sex Positive
65
Departures
64
Outrage
64
Examined Life
64
Throw Down Your Heart
64
Lymelife
63
Tokyo!
63
Cheri
63
Dead Snow
63
Tetro
63
Great Buck Howard, The
62
Cherry Blossoms
62
Big Man Japan
62
Not Forgotten
61
Sunshine Cleaning
60
Under Our Skin
59
Sleep Dealer
58
Julia
58
Easy Virtue
57
Away We Go
57
Merry Gentleman, The
57
Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
56
Girl from Monaco, The
56
American Violet
55
Brothers Bloom, The
54
Is Anybody There?
54
Pontypool
54
Stoning of Soraya M., The
52
Quiet Chaos
50
Management
48
Alien Trespass
45
Whatever Works
42
Little Ashes
42
Tennessee
40
Limits of Control, The
40
Paris 36
38
Gigantic
36
Life is Hot in Cracktown
35
New York
28
Big Shot-Caller, The
28
Surveillance
22
What Goes Up
18
Downloading Nancy
16
I Hate Valentine's Day
xx
Call of the Wild
xx
Home
xx
Offshore
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Paranoid Park
IFC First Take
 |
|
FILM:
MPAA 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)
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Blake Nelson (novel)
Gus Van Sant
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Gus Van Sant
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: October 7, 2008
Theatrical: March 7, 2008
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
90 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
France / USA |

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...
100
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.

100
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.

100
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.

100
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.

91
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.

90
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.

90
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.

90
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.

89
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.

88
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.

88
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.

88
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.

88
Premiere
Glenn Kenny
It's terribly strong -- in structural ingenuity, emotional pull, and particularly visual beauty.

88
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.

83
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.

80
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.

80
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.

75
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.

75
TV Guide
Ken Fox
It's all confusing, woozy and slightly stoned, and feels very much like adolescence.

75
New York Daily News
Elizabeth Weitzman
The story's fractured structure - and Christopher Doyle's dreamlike cinematography - make for a striking mood piece.

75
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
Slight but fascinating.

75
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.

63
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.

60
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.

60
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.

58
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.

50
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.


The average user rating for this movie is 6.1 (out of 10) based on 44 User Votes
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