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.

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

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.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

It's a new and inspired vision of a familiar state of being -- teenage anomie amidst the crumbling wreckage of a middle-class American family. In the space of 78 minutes, Mr. Van Sant and his cinematographer, the peerless Christopher Doyle, manage to suffuse that state with haunting sadness, ubiquitous danger, pulsing power and flickers of hope.

San Francisco Chronicle by David Wiegand

Appropriately structured like a ride on skateboard: It swoops back and forth in time, hovers in midair, twists back on itself over and over again, then rolls into silence.

Los Angeles Times by Carina Chocano

Youth and death meet again in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, a gorgeously stark, mesmerizingly elliptical story told in the same lyrical-prosaic style that has characterized his latest films.

Washington Post by Ann Hornaday

Van Sant is such an assured filmmaker that Paranoid Park is almost inescapably absorbing; he has found a particularly engaging leading man in Miller, whose expressive, even painterly face goes from blank to angelic in the blink of a long-lashed eye.

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center.

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.

Variety by Todd McCarthy

Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth.

Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov

Paranoid Park shows the Portland-based director to be working at the pinnacle of his art in every frame, in every composition. It's breathtaking, heartbreaking, tragic, gorgeous, and true all at the same time.

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.

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.

New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman

The story's fractured structure - and Christopher Doyle's dreamlike cinematography - make for a striking mood piece.

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

It's all confusing, woozy and slightly stoned, and feels very much like adolescence.

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

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.