Detention: Critic Reviews

Bloody teen slasher ridicules genre's many stereotypes.

Sort of like The Breakfast Club meets Donnie Darko, except without a hint of subtlety.

Once you get past the movie's rough beginnings and adjust to its goofy spirit and episodic randomness, Detention becomes a good deal of fun.

There will be young moviegoers who proclaim this genius, and more stodgy audience members who find it torturous. If you're not tweeting and texting a combined 50 times or more per day, you're probably in the latter camp.

Kahn's fast-paced, Aaron Sorkin-like "Detention" deserves cult-hit status. Just as "The Social Network" embodies our Facebook culture, this SXSW film-festival favorite rewrites today's high school movie bible.

Somebody somewhere forgot that a film needs a streamlined story to make visual chaos palatable.

This is a film with enough ideas to fuel five different movies and not a single one of them is any good.

It's as if someone vomited pastel-hued nostalgia. I must apologize for that statement: Pastel vomit would take some effort to produce.

Resembles a movie less than it suggests an evening of determined, incoherent channel-hopping - with the help of a remote control that's apparently stuck on "random."

Desperately strives for the smarts and fun that The Cabin in the Woods achieves through good ideas, not relentless attitude.

Joseph Kahn directs his movie like a ADD kid with a hammer and a xylophone. "Detention" just wears you out.

Detention suffers from a giddy overabundance of ideas rather than a dearth.

The whole thing comes off like 200 commercials smashed together, selling you your own obsolescence.

Joseph Kahn funded this sharp looking, ultra low-budget indie with his own savings, and you get the feeling that he's going for broke in every sense.

An overstuffed but ridiculously fun and gleefully original concoction. "Detention" should earn major "cult hit" status if for no other reason than for its fierce, unflinching juggling of genres and conventions.

... a mash-up of 'Weird Science' and 'Heathers,' madly infatuated with '80s teen films and horror conventions, and paced just right for a generation that digests information 140 characters at a time.

hilariously dissects a new class of teenagers in a world of rapidly shifting reference points and values, where they must piece together their identity from an infinity of retro-cultural models and obscure Wiki data no more than a mouse click away

There's such a celebratory spirit to the whole thing, I adore this movie.