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100With Election, Payne announces himself as one of the keenest purveyors of the scattered pieces that once was an American morality.
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100An invigoratingly mordant comedy that proves that Alexander Payne's rambunctious debut, "Citizen Ruth," was no fluke.
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100Alexander Payne's scathing, subtle, and complexly funny tragicomedy builds a perfect, off-kilter universe--it's a first cousin to "Rushmore."
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100One of the funniest, shrewdest, smartest movies in recent memory.
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100This is a nearly flawless little film, a cheerful nightmare that knows just where it wants to go and uses precisely calibrated comic effects to get there.
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100American satire rarely comes more winning than Election, an exuberantly caustic comedy that shows the symbiotic relationship between political go-get-'em-ism and moral backsliding.
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100The satire of the season, a hilarious, razor-sharp indictment of the American Dream.
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100A wonderful, piercing and hilarious examination of high school politics and how bitter and ruinous it can become.
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90Election is a bracingly intelligent adult comedy that shrewdly captures adolescence.
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90Resonates with the fluorescent horror of real-life high school, something few movies about this generation have managed to successfully capture.
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90Wickedly funny, scathingly original new comedy.
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90Brandishes the sort of intelligent wit and bracing nastiness that will make it more appealing to discerning adults than to teens who just want to have fun.
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88Alexander Payne is a director whose satire is omnidirectional. He doesn't choose an easy target and march on it. He stands in the middle of his story and attacks on all directions.
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88The actors are solid at every position, but Broderick, who seems to get better with each performance, is especially good at playing the impulsively self-destructive yet sympathetic loser.
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88A terrific work of political and social satire set in a Nebraska high school that has the intelligence of (the less coherent) "Rushmore," while painting a much darker picture of politics and human relationships.
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88When it comes to eloquently telling it like it is, Election puts the nation's political pundits to shame.
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88Election has the sharpest satire of any teen movie made in years. Like the best lampoons, it attacks by exaggerating reality ever-so-slightly and targeting a broad range of subjects.
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80Wickedly funny, an ode to youthful overachievers that's as blackhearted as "Rushmore" was gently sentimental.
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80Witherspoon's broad, obsessive comic performance is bound to get the most attention, but Broderick does the best work of his career, finding an affecting spot between the all-purpose defiance of Ferris Bueller and the put-upon foil of his recent work.
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Election is a deft dark comedy with a resemblance to "Rushmore." It's smart no matter what.
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78A fine, near-seamless film that finally suffers slightly from an inability to wrap up its tale.
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75The screenplay by Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, sees the lives of these suburban students and teachers through a prism of absurdity that refracts more truth than any straightforward telling.
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75At best, the humour in Election is perceptive, nasty, pointed, and lets no one off its barbed hook, not even the audience. In other words, it's a lovely piece of satire, made all the more relevant by the setting.
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70Surprise! An intelligent, well-written high school story.
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70Election is finally, necessarily, as much about sex as it is about politics -- wanting it, getting it, losing it.
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70Happily, this irreverent, sharply observant comedy sweeps us into the maelstrom too. Amid the glut of teen movies rolling out of the studios every week, Election deserves special attention.
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70Director Payne, who adapted Tom Perrotta's novel with Jim Taylor, has an authentically dire view of human behavior, which he expresses in crisp, edgy and sometimes startlingly raunchy style.
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70The treatment of this touchy material is impressive, neither gratuitous nor mincing, but this satirical comedy doesn't really go anywhere.
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67Often distastefully juvenile.
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Entertaining but frustratingly uneven.
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50Broderick and Witherspoon give perfectly matched performances at the head of a first-rate cast.
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50The film never finds a confident tone: it's pitched as a satire, but seems to have no real targets.
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40Dumb, dumb, dumb.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 16 out of 18
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Mixed: 0 out of 18
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Negative: 2 out of 18
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[Anonymous]9Great movie. Hilarious. I thought Kevin Kline was surprising good.