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France, United States · 2007
Rated R · 1h 25m
Director Gus Van Sant
Starring Taylor Momsen, Gabe Nevins, Jake Miller, Daniel Liu
Genre Mystery, Crime, Drama
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Hopping freight trains one night with his friends, teenage skateboarder Alex is caught in a scuffle with a security guard that ends in his accidental death. Alex hopes to put this trauma behind him, but after his skateboard is recovered from the river and linked to the scene of the crime, he and his friends are brought in for questioning.
If Paranoid Park is mainly an accumulation of the signs and symbols and images inside Van Sant's own head, that's artistically legitimate. When he makes a feeble effort to connect Alex's plight to the Iraq war and the cultural climate of Bush-era America, I just don't buy it.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant’s current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson’s finely tuned first-person “young adult” novel.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
The story's fractured structure - and Christopher Doyle's dreamlike cinematography - make for a striking mood piece.
The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor.
It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center.
It's all confusing, woozy and slightly stoned, and feels very much like adolescence.
The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt
In Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant enters the world of high school kids just as he did in "Elephant," achieving this time a much sharper, more focused portrait of how these rapidly maturing young people act, think, speak and behave.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth.
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
The film's sound design, sampling Beethoven and Nino Rota, among others, links up with visual miracles performed by Rain Kathy Li and Wong Kar-Wai's noted cinematographer, Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love), to take us inside Alex's head. The result, a defiant slap at slick Hollywood formula, is mesmerizing.
Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth.
Sometimes being young is the toughest job of all.
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