Elephant

Premiere Glenn Kenny

I haven't been crazy about a lot of Van Sant's recent work, but what he does here is simply astonishing. [November 2003, p. 25]

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Van Sant gives no pat or easy answers. Instead he makes us squirm, worry, and think. That's why Elephant is a must-see movie.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The effect is riveting and telling--not always realistic (none of the characters carry cell phones) but often enlightening.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

It simply looks at the day as it unfolds, and that is a brave and radical act; it refuses to supply reasons and assign cures, so that we can close the case and move on.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The atmosphere is hypo-stylized, vividly generic and worse than real, like a doomy Frederick Wiseman documentary.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Makes the Columbine shootings seem both abstract yet more painful and vivid. It also gets you excited all over again about the things movies can do.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

The exquisitely exact photography and sound design represent the highest level of craft of Van Sant's career.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

A movie that throws out the rules with audacity, assurance and admirable moral seriousness.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

An understated, hypnotic stroke of brilliance.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

Working with cinematographer Harris Savides and serving as the film's editor, he (Van Sant) has fashioned a visual style and a narrative shape that has the quality of a waking dream, then a nightmare. Rarely do form and content add up with such harmonious grace and power.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Calmly, almost serenely, Mr. Van Sant and his superb cinematographer, Harris Savides, reveal a vision of contemporary American youth quite unlike any other.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Wisely, a lot like the real event. No answers are given, barely any questions are asked, and the film unfolds at a leisurely, inexorable pace that stymies the traditional filmmaking tropes of tension and release.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Is it, the debate asks, a truly substantial work or just a stylish cop-out? Well, for once, I'm voting with the French.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

To those who see no purpose to this film, I say the purpose is learning not to turn a blind eye. The unique and unforgettable Elephant keeps its eyes wide open.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Has a gentle, hypnotic tone that's insistently sweet and elegiac, in spite of the horrors that overwhelm the frame. In its juxtaposition of the serene and the violent, the beautiful and the brutal, the film achieves a balance that's exquisitely judged, tiptoeing artfully through a cultural minefield.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Like the violence in Alan Clarke's Elephant, the BBC documentary about Northern Ireland from which the film takes its name, Van Sant offers no straightforward reasons for what happens at this particular school. The explosion of violence is far from unmotivated, but its roots are presented as deeply personal and, even more troubling, ultimately inexplicable.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

By making the camera an observer, we get a perspective that often comes out of horror movies, a choice that whips the ordinary with the terrifying, an unforgettable mix.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Beauty competes with vacuity in Elephant, and for a good stretch of writer-director Gus Van Sant's maddeningly passive ode to high school innocence and Columbine-age youthful evil, beauty wins.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

A haunting elegy on the unpredictability of life. Never knowing what the next minute might bring is the elephant in all our lives.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

The film equivalent of Maya Lin's Vietnam monument, that collective gravestone to the fallen, in the way it employs abstract means to quantify the loss of life and elicit a profound sense of grief.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Van Sant's audacious, poetic and emotionally distanced film doesn't even have a plot. It's just a random series of incidents one day at a suburban high school.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

The characters need more exploration, especially the killers. Yet this look at teen life and death chills you anyway.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

What the film does extremely well is take us deep into the crime scene, and give faces to the victims so we can experience this epic, incomprehensible and somehow prototypically American act of violence on a more personal and intimate level.

Newsweek David Ansen

There’s much to argue with, but this unconventional, oddly beautiful film resonates in unexpected ways.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Flagrantly artistic and transfixed by its own enigma, Elephant is strongest on evoking a succession of specific, "empty" moments and weakest on motivation.

The New Yorker David Denby

In the end, this odd, beautiful movie is remote and more suggestive than satisfying--a coolly impassive film about catastrophe made at a time when some of us might prefer an attempt at explanation. And yet Elephant is something to see. [27 October 2003, p. 112]

Slate David Edelstein

It's a daring and original effort, yet so noncommittal--so purposely vague--that it's apt to leave you flummoxed: at once stricken and etherized.

Dallas Observer Bill Gallo

This is a deeply disturbing (if not very satisfying) view of what happened at Columbine and in other school shootings.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

A ­movie that takes impartiality to new places artistically. The film is infuriating.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

It’s just another example of art-house hokey-pokey. Amazingly, this film won both the Palme d’Or and Best Director Award at Cannes, beating out, among others, "Mystic River."

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

As lead Columbine investigator Kate Battan has herself put it, “Everybody wants a quick answer. They want an easy answer so that they can sleep at night and know this is not going to happen tomorrow.” And now they have Gus Van Sant's Elephant.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

Given their lack of training, nearly all the young performers do a commendable job. It's the director who slips up by, among other things, dividing his cast into such predictable phyla.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Achieves some glancing poetic effects during its first hour, but becomes gross and exploitative during the shooting rampage of the final act.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

Elephant is not as bad as the National Rifle Association's decision to hold a pro-gun rally near Columbine High School shortly after the killings. Unlike the NRA, Van Sant doesn't have blood on his hands. But he shares something of its callousness.

Film Threat Don R. Lewis

A pointless rehashing of a horrible event.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

A braggart piece of empty exhibitionism.