Paranoid Park
As teenage skateboarder Alex (Gabe Nevins) hops freight trains with a stranger, a security guard spots them and tries to forcibly remove them. Alex's life begins to fray after he is involved in the accidental death of the security guard.
2 May 1952, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
22 March 1990, Portland, Oregon, USA
October 18, 2008
It's breathtaking, heartbreaking, tragic, gorgeous, and true all at the same time.March 28, 2008
Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant's mesmerizing new movie, melds the dreamy languor of his last few films with a page-turner of a plot.March 21, 2008
Intriguing and obliquely involving.August 07, 2008
It's a movie worth seeing.June 23, 2010
In Paranoid Park, not much actually happens and yet one teenager's mind is filled with far more than enough to ponder for a long time.July 16, 2008
[An] intriguing, mind-altering skateboard elegy.March 21, 2008
Gus Van Sant's capper to a trilogy of experiments in elliptical narrative and lyrical structure is a masterful triumph of art, craft and empathy for the complicatedness of being a real teenager.October 18, 2008
In the hands of cinematographic mastermind Christopher Doyle, teenage spats, telephone calls and coasting skateboarders are infused with lyricism and dreaminess.March 21, 2008
Paranoid Park becomes a portrait of the skate punk as repressed personality. The movie doesn't really go anywhere as a story, it simply unfolds.June 18, 2008
I would say that there is a really good 50 minute movie tucked away inside here, but Van Sant insists on padding it with material that doesn't belong.March 21, 2008
Regarding Paranoid Park as an elongated short rather than a feature helps a bit, because it's a miniature in spirit -- a small-format portrait of psychic malaise that just happens to last 84 minutes.