Paranoid Park 2007

“With Paranoid Park, an intimate character study of an accidental killer, Gus Van Sant has returned… with one of the most moving and delicately felt films of his fascinating career… Shot by the cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li with an acute sensitivity to color as an index of feeling and mood, the film unwinds as a series of nonlinear flashbacks, some of which repeat like the refrain of a song… The angel-faced Gabe Nevins plays Alex, a high school student who spends much of his out-of-class time skateboarding with his friends and fending off a girl who is eager to lose her virginity… The film’s visual beauty is so striking… that it takes a while to appreciate that the images are doing most of the narrative work. You see Alex writing in a notebook and hear him in intermittent voice-over, but the turmoil and confusion churning in his head, as well as the film’s persuasively argued plea for this boy’s fundamental purity, are conveyed through everyday, incidental moments and gestures.” — Manohla Dargis, NY Times