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100Not just a thriller, not just a social commentary, not just a comedy or a romance, but all of those in a clearly seen, brilliantly made film.
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100In some ways, this is "The Graduate" gone to "Lord of the Flies."
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88Lin is a talent to watch. There's a sting to this film that gets to you.
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88Typically, movies aimed at teenage audiences have little concern for things like intelligent scripts, credible characters, and meaningful dialogue. Better Luck Tomorrow contains all three, making it a hugely rewarding experience.
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83Lin energizes the grungy palette with stylistic zing, a hopped-up pace and understated humor. His cast carves out vivid characters and the open-ended aftermath takes stock of the moral scarring without moralizing.
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80It has the virtue of Lin's tangy wit but it also suffers from the vice of a director who, torn between personal vision and wide public reach, tends to smother his ideas under a veneer of cool.
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80Mr. Lin makes the anxious grasping of these kids for some kind of emotional turf -- their own need to shatter the stereotypes that bind them -- the heart of Better Luck Tomorrow, a scenario that keeps the movie's blood racing.
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80Lin's nicely turned out picture is sometimes both predictable and a bit far-fetched narratively, but still provides a generally absorbing look at a slice of society normally taken for granted, both in life and onscreen.
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80Breathes new life into a familiar story: coming of age in high school.
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80An exhilarating ride.
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75What helps Lin's feature-directing debut is his insight into the dark side of living up to "model minority" stereotypes in a materialistic culture.
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75The same premise could have been turned into a satirical comedy, but Better Luck Tomorrow opts for a more corrosive, challenging route, one whose troubling, morally ambiguous ending offers no easy resolution.
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75Bracing and stylish thriller.
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75"Rebel Without a Cause" with a debate club, Better Luck Tomorrow is a sharp, smart slice of suburban angst among the high school overachiever set.
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75Well-crafted, Tarantino-esque story.
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75Has a vitality and novelty rare in any youth movie, let alone one that claps fresh eyes on a cliched vision of a model minority.
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75Lin works with a rhythmic observational flair that outweighs the movie's flaws. It's a long way from Long Duk Dong.
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70A rare high school dramedy with some heft to it. Smartly photographed and edited, it manages to walk the difficult tightrope strung between the typically loopy coming of age film and a simmering disaster in the making.
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70Although this movie shows Lin's promising moviemaking sensibilities, its point of view feels coldly amoral and dismissive.
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70The performances are strong without calling attention to themselves--which is more than I can say for the occasionally hackneyed use of rock on the sound track.
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67A film that merges cocaine, Ivy League, college applications, the Asian American experience, dark comedy and high school drama while maintaining a personal tone and likable lead characters is just too impressive to knock.
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63Like his characters, Lin may be an overachiever and the strain of trying to do too much shows. He merges genres the way Ben juggles extracurricular activities.
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63Good idea for a movie about rebellious Asian Americans doesn't fully pan out.
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60Follows a consistently predictable arc. In some sequences, you can tell not just what's going to happen next, but what shot is coming next. And the movie's weird mixture of moralism and affectlessness cancel each other out.
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60Though it doesn't fully transcend its small budget (the lighting is dingy), the story feels rooted in something more solid than prefab posturing.
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60It almost plays like a darkly comic "Peanuts" special.
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50The film lacks a single emotionally authentic moment.
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50The crime isn't that the movie's message is amoral, but that it goes totally unexamined, as if the recess bell rang too early.
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50The end result is a series of stylish vignettes, some entertaining and all variations on essentially the same theme.
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50Seeing BLT has been positioned as a political act. Alas: The film in question seems hardly worth the fuss.
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40uUltimately Better Luck Tomorrow feels nearly as hollow and unknowable as its characters’ hearts.
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40Perhaps the worst thing that could be said about Better Luck Tomorrow is that, on a slow night, it's easy to imagine these delinquents wanting to rent a film just like it.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 16 out of 23
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Mixed: 3 out of 23
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Negative: 4 out of 23
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DasP10