Critics reviews

Paranoid Park may seem like a sketch, yet it catches in luminous amber a moment when reality bloodily, necessarily pierces the myth of adolescent purity.

The film is washed away by the quirky music choices Van Sant made for the soundtrack. They turn Paranoid Park into a pleasant mix tape made by somebody with okay taste. It doesn’t help that his mix tape is offered to teenagers.

At its frightened core, Paranoid Park is about the bridge of guilt that spans the crossing between innocent and innocence lost, kids and adults, however and in whatever form it may arrive. From a strictly filmmaking standpoint, it's unique and brutal in its beauty and the truth it tells, and so, too, is Van Sant's visual style, which visually shuffles VHS, Super-8, and 35mm alongside an equally nonlinear tale that features a cast of young people chosen almost entirely from the ranks of MySpace.com...

On its face, the ruminative, time-scrambling style and spontaneous visuals of "Paranoid Park" might lead viewers to call it experimental. But take away such perennial Van Sant mannerisms as slow-motion shots and quirky soundtrack and it's quite conventional -- especially compared with such audacious recent ventures as "Elephant," "Gerry" and "Last Days."

In Paranoid Park, Alex’s face becomes the director’s road map. 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.

"Paranoid Park" isn't a big film, but it is exceedingly well made and provocative. For some of the way, it seems like a kind of skateboard whodunit. Soon enough, we understand it's much more than that. And by then, we know we're in for a ride to remember.

[I]t'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.

The narrative moves in arcs and curves, like the skateboarders who float and glide around in dreamy 8mm slow-motion... "Paranoid Park" is a companion piece to Van Sant's "Elephant"... and, by extension, "Gerry" and "Last Days".

Conjuring a submersive audio/visual atmosphere that is neither dreamy nor exactly expressionistic, Paranoid Park nevertheless gets into the headspace of its young high school skater protagonist and treats with supreme respect what might be best described as a blown mind.

It is a modestly scaled triumph without a false or wasted moment.

Keeping a respectful distance, the dreamily unsettling film—stunningly shot by cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li—follows Nevins from skate park to coffee shop to a home that doesn't really feel like home anymore, drifting along with him as he makes decisions that will shape the rest of his life, even if the present crisis passes. It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center.

Aesthetically in line with “Gerry,” “Elephant” and “Last Days,” this is a rarified, arid artwork that will register with Van Sant’s hardcore fans but leave anyone looking for more conventional satisfactions, notably teenagers themselves, impatient and unfulfilled.