American Beauty: Critic Reviews

As the latest mainstream movie symptom of our premillennial malaise, American Beauty is so brilliantly acted, written, directed and visualized that for all its despondency and despair, it is a lot of fun.

This is definitely a knife-to-the-heart movie -- the kind whose potent effect is easy to feel yet hard to describe.

The kind of artful defiance that Hollywood is usually too timid to deliver: a jolting comedy that makes you laugh till it hurts.

Cripplingly broad, with network-sitcom beats dressed in R-rated threads... [endorses] a particularly adolescent male point of view.

Powerful acting, great story, but far too mature for kids.

The flaws that exist in American Beauty are effortlessly overcome by a cast that blossoms. Spacey in particular exhibits a rare wit and gravitas with Lester's weary frowns and cutting smirks, proving his mettle in this career peak performance.

It's daring in that it sympathizes with a protagonist who's a pederast though its portrait of an American family on the brink of collapse is essentially a cartoon

One of the most startling, brilliant pictures to come out of a major studio in many years.

An elusive and allusive work of art that won't be pinned down easily.

Recently, Happiness and Election have taken pot shots at suburban morals and ethics, but none has hit so close to the bone and so on-target as American Beauty.

It's like Norman Bates getting good advice from Mother.

An incisive if over-the-top take on familial dysfunction.

Above all, "American Beauty" is about finding peace and a sense of wonder in the least likely of places, such as your inner torment or, failing that, perhaps a floating plastic bag.

Brit Sam Mendes makes an impressive directorial debut with a glossy, well-acted satire of the American burbs, a theatrically stylized meditation that combines the zeitgeist of 1950s Eisnehower with that of 1990s Clinton.

Dark, intelligent, scandalous, emotional, and truthful -- one of the year's best.

Director Mendes guides an artful path between desire and self-disgust, playing youth against experience, male against female.

This is what movies are all about.

Complexity, say quite a few of my colleagues. Lies, I say.

As the world changed in the past five years, so did the relevance of American Beauty.

A stylish film about an American family that pretends to be moral and enlightened, but revels in its mean-spirited sarcasm and its championing of self-interest.

Like Network in the 1970s and Ordinary People in the '80s, American Beauty is a scathing reflection of contemporary American life.

Spacey's style and delivery save the film time after time.

Filled with moments of uncommon intelligence, sensitivity, truth and wit, American Beauty is an instant American classic.

It is a great film and will definitely be regarded as one of the best films of the 90's ... right next to Titanic.

Time and again, you fear Mendes won't be able to sustain such a confident shuffling of his pack, but somehow he does, and for once the result is a genuine surprise.