| 100 |
Chicago Sun-Times
I wanted to hug this movie. It takes such a risky journey and never steps wrong. It creates specific, original, believable, lovable characters, and meanders with them through their inconsolable days, never losing its sense of humor.
|
| 100 |
The New York Times
It's surely the best depiction of teenage eccentricity since "Rushmore," and its incisive satire of the boredom and conformity that rule our thrill-seeking, individualistic land, and also its question-mark ending, reminded me of "The Graduate."
|
| 100 |
Austin Chronicle
Ghost World resists convenient closures and summaries and some may take issue with its open-endedness. But anything else would have been phony, and Enid would never have stood for it.
|
| 91 |
Entertainment Weekly
A buoyant, funny, and disarmingly humane comedy of beautiful losers in revolt.
|
| 90 |
Slate
Pitch-perfect -- not just the most enjoyable movie of the year but the first (after Crumb) to get the tone of a certain strain of "underground" comic right.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
Buscemi makes Seymour into a character you simply want to see again and again. He's the most appealing, amusing "loser" anyone could ever share old records with.
|
| 90 |
Rolling Stone
Let the unsettling secrets of this outrageously funny and steadily engrossing meditation on the life of two high school misfits after graduation catch you by surprise. It's that good.
|
| 90 |
Village Voice
Keep your "Lara Croft" and your "Shrek": For me, the summer's reigning icons are Enid, Thora Birch's geek goddess in Ghost World, and her action-movie analogue.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.
|
| 90 |
Time
In this arid landscape, the edifice of Ghost World, with all its acute insolence, stands out like the Taj Mahal.
|
| 90 |
Newsweek
Jeff Giles
In the hearts of losers, Zwigoff’s found a real winner.
|
| 90 |
Chicago Reader
If, like me, you've been wondering how Terry Zwigoff, the brilliant documentary filmmaker who made "Crumb," would negotiate his shift to fiction filmmaking, here's your answer: brilliantly.
|
| 90 |
Salon.com
Offers an exquisite tour of the twilight zone between high school and the so-called real world, as well as between bohemian subculture and the even stranger culture of America at large.
|
| 90 |
Wall Street Journal
Smart, surpassingly odd, extremely funny and mysteriously endearing at the same time.
|
| 90 |
LA Weekly
Zwigoff pulls off something in Ghost World that seems a minor miracle -- he creates someone with a complex inner life.
|
| 88 |
New York Daily News
Funny, insightful, unpredictable and blessed with pitch-perfect performances, Ghost World is one of the year's best movies.
|
| 88 |
Boston Globe
Whatever portion of the alienated teen angst championship Thora Birch left unclaimed after ''American Beauty,'' she nails down brilliantly in Ghost World.
|
| 88 |
New York Post
As hip, funny and truthful a sleeper as has ever flown under Tinseltown's radar.
|
| 88 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
There's a loneliness at the heart of this world, and Ghost World, that's really touching -- and a bit scary, too.
|
| 88 |
Miami Herald
A unique bond still develops between the two outcasts, leading to an unexpected resolution that ends this subtle, deeply humane movie on an ambiguous, but unmistakably hopeful, note.
|
| 88 |
USA Today
Ghost World draws super, natural performances.
|
| 83 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A funny, sad, scary and ultimately tragic coming-of-age drama/black comedy that skillfully -- and uncompromisingly -- creates its own world and uniquely pessimistic vision.
|
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
Ghost World is above all a disquieting consciousness-raiser.
|
| 80 |
TV Guide
This mordantly funny, emotionally piquant depiction of post-adolescent angst also has its roots in the graphic novel format.
|
| 80 |
Variety
By sharp turns poignant, disturbing and hysterically funny.
|
| 80 |
New Times (L.A.)
Despite the presence of several sublimely cracked actors and some of the most abrasive white-trash caricatures since "Raising Arizona," Birch totally owns this movie.
|
| 80 |
Mr. Showbiz
The results are both savagely funny and poignant for anyone who's ever had a friendship that felt like their only connection to the outside world.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Carla Meyer
Bests most other teen comedies right off the bat. If you got a kick out of "Crumb," this film will crack you up.
|
| 75 |
Baltimore Sun
In his first fiction feature, Zwigoff doesn't forget to bring the funny. But he doesn't bring enough poetry.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
What I did like unreservedly was the acting. Enid, as enacted by the sometimes astonishing Birch, is one of the more convincing, no-nonsense teens in recent movies.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Has social, psychological, and ultimately mystical overtones that raise it leagues above most other teen-centered comedies.
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