Chain Camera Image
Metascore

Generally favorable reviews - based on 12 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 4 Ratings

  • Summary: Ten students at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles were given video cameras to film their lives. There were no limitations on what they could shoot. After one week, the cameras were given to ten new students, who filmed their lives for a week, then handed the cameras on. Like chain letters, these cameras were passed from student to student for an entire year. (FilmNoir Post Productions) Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 12
  2. Negative: 0 out of 12
  1. 90
    By turns playful, harrowing, intensely moving, and uproariously funny, Chain Camera cuts away all documentary artifice and goes straight to the source, allowing these kids to reveal themselves with the utmost directness and candor.
  2. 80
    Hilarious, unnerving and remarkably intimate portrait of multiethnic adolescent life that lends vigorous new meaning to the term "teen movie."
  3. 80
    The results are far more real than MTV's The Real World.
  4. 50
    Absorbing in places, but considering the large and diverse pool the filmmakers had to draw from, it's a surprisingly repetitive and predictable collection of big-city sagas.

See all 12 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 2
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 2
  3. Negative: 0 out of 2