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100A shockingly powerful screed against racism that also manages to be so well performed and directed that it is entertaining as well. [30 October 1998, Friday, p.A]
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91Feels as true as a documentary, as painful as a blow to the heart.
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90What makes this film so powerful is that its unanswered questions force the audience to examine hate and its consequences making American History X one lesson you can't miss.
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83This is the sort of incendiary role a lot of actors would kill for, yet the shock of Norton's performance isn't its showboat flamboyance. It's that he makes this sadistic junior sociopath rueful and intelligent.
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80American History X is a crash course on how to make a message movie that resonates with crackling power.
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80A true achievement -- no matter who eventually wants to take, or deny, credit for its creation.
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80Despite a cheap, Hollywood ending and despite Kaye's kooky campaign, X is a killer.
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An inflated yet gut-slugging film.
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80Jolting, superbly acted film.
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75A series of well-drawn sketches and powerful scenes, in search of an organizing principle.
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75Unflinching in its depiction of racism, anti-Semitism, violence and jailhouse politics.
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Such an ambitious, well-acted film that it's easy to overlook its flaws as relatively minor.
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75While this movie is sometimes overbaked, it is the first major studio release in a while to engross wall-to-wall.
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75May be flawed, but it's not easily forgotten.
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70It's Norton who makes the film such an enlightening experience, and he's mesmerizing.
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70Norton's performance, which is every bit as varied as his Oscar-nominated work in Primal Fear, once more demonstrates that he's one of the most remarkable chameleons working in film.
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70It's a testament to Norton's utter immersion in the role that he can even halfway connect the dots between this fundamentally sweet, brainy kid and the magnetic, white trash monster who'll haunt our minds long after the movie's liberal pieties fade into static.
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70Trenchant and visceral, American History X may not be perfect, but it's a darn sight better than good.
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70The movie can't explain as much as it wants to about what makes (and unmakes) a skinhead, but it carries us a fair distance.
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67A violent, sober cautionary tale, strictly middle-of-the-road when it comes to its much-ballyhooed politics and grimly obvious in its telling.
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63Excellent in flashes, unintentionally absurd and lead-footed at other moments, the movie stumbles under the weight of its own grandiose intentions.
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60Director Tony Kaye may be reaching for opera, but screenwriter David McKenna has set his sights distinctly lower.
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There may be much to like about his movie, but it's all been done before to more challenging degrees of moral ambiguity. That's a pretty fatal flaw.
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60This material is charged enough without piling on the melodrama and the lip-smacking violence. The movie too often sacrifices reportage for razzle-dazzle.
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60It's hard to know whom to blame for the film's choppiness, its mixture of rage and sentimentality, the stridency of some of the acting.
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The picture is smothered by solemn right-mindedness, and hobbled by scripter David McKenna's simplistic, knee-jerk liberal take on suburban white racism.
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50As a visit to a world and a way of life most of us will never experience, American History X is vivid, and it feels honest. At the very least, it's not typical.
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50For all its surface verisimilitude and for all its focus on a problem that couldn't be more current, this film can't manage to feel more than sporadically real.
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40Fails dramatically as well as ideologically.
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25Norton's high-energy acting is the only element that saves the picture from being a total loss.
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A mess of a film.
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20A mousy little nothing of a picture.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 84 out of 88
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Mixed: 1 out of 88
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Negative: 3 out of 88
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10
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JamesM4