The primary interest of American Graffiti is its setting and the nostalgia that it conjures.

| Nov 8, 2023

The movie has no resonance except from the jukebox sound and the eerie, nocturnal jukebox look.

| Sep 19, 2023

A surprise blockbuster hit with an enormous and lasting cultural footprint.

| Aug 26, 2023

The ostensible narrative focus is Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), the sensitive scholarship kid determined to break away, but the film, sometimes to its detriment, is more in love with the vibrant small-town milieu.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 20, 2021

Without unnecessary nudging or underlining, Lucas beautifully establishes his characters as both enslaved to the image of themselves which the media have given them and permanently in need of its company.

| Mar 27, 2020

The movie is a comic poem which celebrates the past but also catalogues its textures with telling precision. American Graffiti looks like no other movie, an achievement which is always the best measure of a truly gifted director.

| Aug 1, 2017

This superb and singular film catches not only the charm and tribal energy of the teen-age 1950s but also the listlessness and the resignation that underscored it all like an incessant bass line in one of the rock-'n'-roll songs of the period.

| Jul 7, 2014

Brilliant and highly influential.

| Original Score: A+ | Feb 14, 2012

A funny-serious movie with gorgeous cars and colours and an amazing feel for the artefacts of an instantly vanished era.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 6, 2008

There is brilliant interplaying and underplaying, of script, performers and direction which will raise howls of laughter from audiences, yet never descends on the screen to overdone mugging, pratfall and other heavy-handed devices normally employed.

| Jun 27, 2007

A brilliant work of popular art, it redefined nostalgia as a marketable commodity and established a new narrative style, with locale replacing plot, that has since been imitated to the point of ineffectiveness.

| Jun 27, 2007

The film that launched a thousand careers.

| Jun 24, 2006

American Graffiti acts almost as a milestone to show us how far (and in many cases how tragically) we have come.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 23, 2004

It is a very good movie, funny, tough, unsentimental.

| May 21, 2003

Teen tales don't get much better than this.

| Jan 1, 2000