American Graffiti (1973)

All Critics (37) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (39) | Rotten (1) | DVD (15)

There is brilliant interplaying and underplaying, of script, performers and direction which will raise howls of laughter from audiences, yet never descends on the screen to overdone mugging, pratfall and other heavy-handed devices normally employed.

June 27, 2007 Full Review

A.D. Murphy

Variety

Top Critic

A brilliant work of popular art, it redefined nostalgia as a marketable commodity and established a new narrative style, with locale replacing plot, that has since been imitated to the point of ineffectiveness.

June 27, 2007 Full Review

Dave Kehr

Chicago Reader

Top Critic

The film that launched a thousand careers.

June 24, 2006 Full Review

Geoff Andrew

Time Out

Top Critic

American Graffiti acts almost as a milestone to show us how far (and in many cases how tragically) we have come.

October 23, 2004 Full Review

Roger Ebert

Chicago Sun-Times

Top Critic

It is a very good movie, funny, tough, unsentimental.

May 21, 2003 Full Review

Roger Greenspun

New York Times

Top Critic

Playfully suggests what life was like for white teenagers in small-town America during the 1950s and early 1960s.

May 21, 2012 Full Review

Dennis Schwartz

Ozus' World Movie Reviews

American Graffiti is a music-infused tone poem - a fond, delicate trip back to an era often forgotten.

January 29, 2012 Full Review

R. L. Shaffer

IGN DVD

It's one of the all-time great feel good films, but its sly cultural commentary is what makes it the masterpiece that it is.

April 22, 2011 Full Review

Thomas Caldwell

Cinema Autopsy

Coming-of-age classic still a must-see for teens.

January 2, 2011 Full Review

Randy White

Common Sense Media

A funny-serious movie with gorgeous cars and colours and an amazing feel for the artefacts of an instantly vanished era.

May 6, 2008 Full Review

Empire Magazine

Lucas' direction is skilful and assured -- he follows several stories with wit and sensitivity -- and he's matched by his cast, the whole film perfectly evoking the end of an era.

May 6, 2008 Full Review

Film4

If Last picture Show presents gloomy portrait of small-town life prior to the advent of TV, Lucas moves the setting forward by a decade, in 1962, when TV had already become the mainstay of pop culture, though for his youths, radio is the relevant medium.

February 13, 2006 Full Review

Emanuel Levy

EmanuelLevy.Com

...the ultimate nostalgia movie of all time ...

December 6, 2005 Full Review

Brad Laidman

Film Threat

Lucas' sleeper hit...casts a rose-colored eye back to a placid pre-Vietnam America, a time when rock 'n' roll was young and hot rods were cool.

June 3, 2005 Full Review

Thomas Delapa

Boulder Weekly

A successful tribute to an era of optimism and competitiveness which was bitchin' -- and now seems very far in the past.

May 4, 2005 Full Review

David Bezanson

Filmcritic.com

• 1. Debbie: Besides, it only took me one night to realize if brains were dynamite you couldn't blow your nose.
  – Submitted by Thomas M (3 months ago)
• 1. Carol: Your car is uglier than I am. That didn't come out right.
  – Submitted by Eduardo T (17 months ago)
• 1. Curt Henderson: I'm telling you this was the most perfect, dazzling creature I've ever seen!
  2. Steve Bolander: She's gone. Forget it.
  3. Curt Henderson: She spoke to me, she spoke to me right through the window. I think she said I love you. That means nothing to you people? You have no romance, no soul? Someone wants me. Someone roaming the streets wants me. Will you turn the corner?
  – Submitted by Hector H (19 months ago)
• 1. Steve Bolander: You wanna end up like John? You just can't stay seventeen forever.
  – Submitted by Hector H (19 months ago)

There are no discussion threads for American Graffiti yet.