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100Shows how a documentary can be as moving and suspenseful as the best narrative feature.
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100The documentary American Teen is the most realistic movie you will see all summer.
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91The players are timelessly familiar in American Teen, too. But filmmaker Nanette Burstein tells their stories with a distinctly 21st-century pop and audacity.
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90Never has a film captured the spirit of being a teenager better.
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88So authentic are the subjects, so raw their emotions.
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88The kids are real and their stories enthralling: When it comes to drama, there's nothing quite like high school.
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83Though it's compelling enough as soap opera, American Teen digs deeply into why kids grudgingly accept the roles they've been given and the brutal consequences that come with straying outside the lines.
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75Reality tv, welcome to the multiplex. If "The Hills" went back to high school and developed wit, perception and a conscience, it might play something like Nanette Burstein's wallop of a doc.
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75American Teen isn't as penetrating or obviously realistic as her "On the Ropes," but Burstein has achieved an engrossing film.
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75As close to fraudulent as a documentary can get and still be worth seeing.
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75Though it could work as effectively as a television vehicle, American Teen is revealing, funny and involving.
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75Parents are another matter. Almost to a man and woman they lay expectations on their children that ignore who those children are.
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75An entertaining slice-of-life documentary that gets ever more fascinating as it moves along.
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Even when it's ripping off "Juno" and "The Hills," American Teen is fascinating in the way of every good documentary--the more time you spend with anyone, the more they surprise you.
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70What makes Nanette Burstein's movie so powerful is its uncanny sense of familiarity.
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67Like much reality TV, sections of American Teen seem patently staged, or coached, for the camera.
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63The movie is entertaining on a superficial level, but there's little beneath the surface.
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63So is the result just a case of life imitating pop art, or has the director shaped the footage to enhance the imitation?
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60For all of its access and exposure, American Teen seems skin-deep. It's well shot, with good production values and lots of cool music. But it's fun and facile in much the same way reality TV is.
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60The kids here do come across as genuine people, struggling with issues everyone can understand.
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60The movie does get under your skin (the tremulous misfit girl, Hannah, might be a breakout role model), but the way it has been put together reminds me of those animal shows where the crew nudges the gazelles in the direction of the lions with multiple cameras standing by.
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60This is the kind of movie the people in it might have made, which means that its revelatory power as an investigation of teenage life in America is limited.
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60Undeniably entertaining for its zippy presentation.
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50The students all say and do more than they should in the filmmaker's presence, which certainly makes them watchable -- sort of a slow-motion train wreck.
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50The poster art for Nanette Burstein's American Teen, which follows five students through their senior year at a high school in Indiana, is modeled after the one for "The Breakfast Club." So, to a large extent, is this ultra-slick and predictable documentary.
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50Unsurprisingly, the formulaic "Breakfast Club" casting yields a formulaic narrative.
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Here are casual cruelty, crushing heartbreak and pressure from parents and peers, all of which can involve the viewer but are nothing revelatory.
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50This being senior year, Burstein can't help but capture some genuine drama, but there's a stage-managed quality to the movie that reminded me of MTV reality shows.
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20At times it's almost like "Lord of the Flies," with the camera serving as the flypaper dipped in the honey of the promised land of celebrity.
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