American Graffiti Reviews
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Playfully suggests what life was like for white teenagers in small-town America during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
IGN DVD
American Graffiti is a music-infused tone poem - a fond, delicate trip back to an era often forgotten.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
Cinema Autopsy
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Common Sense Media
Coming-of-age classic still a must-see for teens.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Empire Magazine
A funny-serious movie with gorgeous cars and colours and an amazing feel for the artefacts of an instantly vanished era.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Film4
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.
Top CriticThere 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.
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.
The film that launched a thousand careers.
EmanuelLevy.Com
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Film Threat
...the ultimate nostalgia movie of all time ...
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Boulder Weekly
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.
Filmcritic.com
A successful tribute to an era of optimism and competitiveness which was bitchin' -- and now seems very far in the past.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
American Graffiti acts almost as a milestone to show us how far (and in many cases how tragically) we have come.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
