Funny and fresh, it won't break boundaries but it will make anyone thankful for growing up.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 7, 2009

Despite its flashy approach, American Teen remains emotionally involving because of the lives on show. You will care about these people, even if you suspect the director doesn't.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 6, 2009

It's a lightly amusing film but it's also an unchallenging one which reinforces presumptions about kids rather than surprising with new insights. It floats in the shallow end of filmmaking.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 6, 2009

The documentary curriculum is sex, gossip and self-pity. Not exactly original, but disturbingly true.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 6, 2009

This film was for me marred by the persistent suspicion that the director wasn't being entirely straight with us.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 6, 2009

It is medium-mesmerising, even if we are gnawed by secret shame at watching a glorified reality 온라인카지노추천 show.

| Mar 6, 2009

At times it looks rather staged for camera, in the manner of reality television, but there's a lot more to like and enjoy here than you might suppose.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 6, 2009

Burstein orchestrates their passage through school with some sympathy and no real revelations - except for the fact that she guesses, probably correctly, that most teenagers are nothing like as dangerous and bolshie as a lot of adults believe.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 6, 2009

What it might lack in plausibility, it makes up for with charm, laughs and an optimistic ending.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2009

Either one of the most intimate and revealing documentaries ever made about the trials and tribulations of being a teenager in America or a clever fraud.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 1, 2008

Written and directed by Nanette Burstein, it's like an intricate and many-layered slice of reality television transferred to the big screen, by turns funny, sad, painful, embarrassing, crude and strangely moving.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 1, 2008

Several remarkable sequences illustrate just how oblivious some teens can be to the fact they are being recorded.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 20, 2008

A surprising film, and quite an impressive one.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 19, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 18, 2008

A blatantly direct pastiche of The Breakfast Club, if not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2.

Full Review | Sep 22, 2008

They all have their stories tell, some more complicated than others.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 8, 2008

What her cameras capture shouldn't be construed as truth but rather as scenarios that were cast in stone long before she came on the scene.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 8, 2008

A moving and engrossing slice-of-life documentary about teen life in small-town Warsaw, Ind.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 1, 2008

Eventually Burstein moves past these objections and slips under your skin.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 1, 2008

American Teen shows how a documentary can be as moving and suspenseful as the best narrative feature.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 1, 2008