Making fun of art students is like shooting Darwin fish in a barrel.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2007

Curiously, this relentlessly cynical tone turns out sounding refreshingly original compared to the usual pieties in the genre.

Full Review | Jul 12, 2006

This smarty-pants campus yarn is on fire with satire.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 3, 2006

With an inert suddenness the picture looses both its charm and its nerve, descending into a subplot about a serial killer that stalls everything out completely.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 12, 2006

No matter which is the real imitator, life or art, Art School Confidential does its own fine job skewering both.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 12, 2006

The film loses its way with multiple subplots, becoming a hodgepodge that isn't particularly hard to follow, but, far worse, provides no compelling reason to bother.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 12, 2006

Zwigoff's angry exposé of this intense, tiny subculture isn't fair to anyone in the art world, but if you can stomach the overstatement, it's often scathingly funny. And it's sometimes scathingly smart.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 12, 2006

What keeps the film from being altogether snide and smug are the well-intentioned performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 12, 2006

There's not a single person to like in Art School Confidential, a crucial mistake in a movie filled with mean, shallow and self-absorbed characters.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 12, 2006

Simply runs out of things to do once it establishes its ground rules of defining stereotypes and mocking pretension.

Full Review | Original Score: C | May 12, 2006

There is something in the Zwigoffian universe that values such characters [as Jimmy]; having abandoned all illusions, they offer the possibility of truth. I also much enjoyed Broadway Bob.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 12, 2006

Even if one disagrees with some of its points, as I do, it offers plenty to mull over.

Full Review | May 12, 2006

It becomes the sort of thing Zwigoff usually holds in contempt, and how depressing is that?

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 12, 2006

Enjoyable and reprises the same dyspeptic attitude that infused Ghost World, but ultimately it lacks its predecessor's originality and humanity.

| May 11, 2006

It's pleasant enough, features fine acting in smaller parts, rises occasionally to laughs or plot, but its ambitions and its accomplishments are modest.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 11, 2006

The movie accomplishes the simple-enough task of demonstrating that art school types are pretentious and self-centered. What it fails to reveal is why anyone should care.

| May 11, 2006

Against this atmospheric background the characters have the depth of stick figures.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 11, 2006

Proposes to paint a black comedy, but instead has the outsize ears and lopsided, leering grin of bad caricature.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 11, 2006

Risks more highs and lows than the plaintive, even-toned Ghost World. But both, improbably, have made themselves more or less at home on screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 11, 2006

It's often as naive as it is knowing and can feel as unfocused and sketchy as a film one of Strathmore's students might make.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | May 11, 2006