Clueless: Critic Reviews

There's such a gaping discontinuity between her physical beauty and her vacant, gum-snapping personality that she's like a walking advertisement for everything that's right and wrong with America.

While Miss Silverstone guides Cher through the witty costume changes that serve as character development, she's backed up by a solid supporting cast.

Silverstone guilelessly glides through her role like a Pam-sprayed charge card.

While Cher and the other characters here may seem vacuous and spoiled, Heckerling -- who wrote the script as well -- is a gentle satirist.

Parents are traditionally invisible and/or lame in teen flicks, but Dan Hedaya, as Silverstone's sharklike litigator dad, does a drop-dead Robert Shapiro, biting off some of the best lines in the movie.

The movie is aimed at teenagers, but like all good comedies, it will appeal to anyone who has a sense of humor and an ear for the ironic.

Though this drifts at times as storytelling, it's mainly lightweight but personable fun.

A fresh, disarmingly bright and at times explosively funny comedy well worth a trip to the mall, even if it eventually runs out of gas.

As appealing as Alicia Silverstone is (and she possesses that ethereal 'star quality' which is sadly lacking in many of today's up-and-coming performers), her presence can't quite elevate this breezy comedy to the level of a modern classic.

Silverstone is a winner. And so is the movie, which also functions as a lunatic update of Emma, the 1816 Jane Austen novel.

The most surprising thing about Clueless, given how enthusiastically it indicts its characters and their universe, is how much fun it is.

The summer's most compelling movie about teenagers.

Clueless is a happy bubble, and Alicia Silverstone comes into her own as a confident young comedienne.

Silverstone makes Cher's insularity appealingly innocent (even in the midst of crisis, she can't resist checking out the latest fashion lines), and an attempted seduction scene is sweetly hopeless.

...although the movie isn't quite the classic it's been made out to be, it's a mindlessly diverting way to kill 97 minutes.

Smug and self-loathing.

The movie's simple yet spot-on characters and performances make the laughs timeless, no matter how firmly the film is set in 1995.

The fact that you instantly like these spoiled little rich kids is a testament to Amy Heckerling's skills as a screenwriter.

A very funny movie that elevates its genre.

Quickly becoming a teen-angst classic.

Sly, witty comedy.