Elephant: Critic Reviews

From the first images of drilling footballers and swirling clouds in an autumnal sky, Van Sant conjures the feeling of suburban school-year everydayness with Proustian power.

By making the camera an observer, we get a perspective that often comes out of horror movies, a choice that whips the ordinary with the terrifying, an unforgettable mix.

An understated, hypnotic stroke of brilliance.

A small, improvisatory, quiet movie whose modesty and lack of preening self-importance mask what is actually a remarkably ambitious and bravura piece of filmmaking.

An 86-minute cosmic provocation to rethink how we talk about the unspeakable, the scapegoats we look for, the effigies we burn.

Uneven though he may be, Van Sant rivals Steven Soderbergh as the mad scientist of commercial filmmakers -- and the wildly polarizing Elephant is his most successful experiment to date.

The film is infuriating.

We ask: Who are these people? Which ones are troubled enough to bring guns to school? What are their lives like? What made them this way?

Elephant demands a commitment to sticking with a nontraditional story. There's no three-act structure here, no consolation at the end of the line.

It is hard to make absolute sense of. Yet it invites us to feel quite strongly about our conclusions.

It simply looks at the day as it unfolds, and that is a brave and radical act; it refuses to supply reasons and assign cures, so that we can close the case and move on.

An exercise in voyeurism and a trancelike plunge into the dark side of American teen life that can both fascinate and repel you.

Startling and brilliant.

Elephant is the film equivalent of Maya Lin's Vietnam monument, that collective gravestone to the fallen, in the way it employs abstract means to quantify the loss of life and elicit a profound sense of grief.

As movies go, it's wholly predictable, occasionally and intentionally dull, and apparently quite lazy.

A living, breathing work that's distinctively different from the regular hyper-reality of Hollywood films.

Elephant is so contrived and minimalistic that it has the dramatic effect of a line drawing.

To make a film about something like the Columbine student shootings incident and provide no insight or enlightenment would seem to be pointless at best and irresponsible at worst, and that is what Gus Van Sant has done in Elephant.

The minimalist Elephant is not going to satisfy audiences who need everything spelled out for them, but others will find it a refreshing approach to social problems that defy facile explanations.

Van Sant, whose films often connect, sensitively, with the thinking of young people, has made a film that says things are wrong with kids today. We're missing the obvious.

The film is understatement at its most powerful.

The most fluid of films, it glides through its 81 minutes with a mesmerizing ease, skating on smooth tracking shots down the corridors of an American high school and into the heart of an American malaise.