American Graffiti (1973)
97 %
Reviews Counted: 33 Fresh: 32 Rotten:1 Average Rating: 8.3/10
Consensus:
One of the most influential of all teen films, American Graffiti is a funny, nostalgic, and bittersweet look at a group of recent high school grads' last days of innocence.
Runtime: 1 hr 52 mins
Synopsis: Set in 1962; Produced and released in 1973. AMERICAN GRAFFITI presents a powerful collage of youth on the brink of maturity just before the assassination of J.F.K.. Based on George Lucas's own teenage hot-rodding days in Modesto, California, this brilliant, bittersweet comedy... [More]
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, MacKenzie Phillips, Candy Clark
Director: George Lucas
Screenwriter: George Lucas, Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck
Producer: Gary Kurtz, Francis Ford Coppola
Screenwriter: George Lucas, Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck
Producer: Gary Kurtz, Francis Ford Coppola
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
A funny-serious movie with gorgeous cars and colours and an amazing feel for the artefacts of an instantly vanished era.
Comment
05/06/08
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.
05/06/08
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.
06/27/07
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.
06/27/07
Top Critic
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.
02/13/06
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.
06/03/05
A successful tribute to an era of optimism and competitiveness which was bitchin’ -- and now seems very far in the past.
05/04/05
American Graffiti acts almost as a milestone to show us how far (and in many cases how tragically) we have come.
10/23/04
Top Critic
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