Elephant (2003)

The film simply observes a day at a high school leading to a massacre without offering explanations or theories for the violence. Van Sant drains the violence of glamour and purpose, creating an anti-violence statement through flat, uninflected presentation.

The critic finds the film a stunningly effective return to Van Sant's indie roots, blending them with a European sensibility to depict a Columbine-style shooting with dreamy, un-violent detachment and hyperreal ordinariness. It singles out the blankness and lack of affect in the assailants, along with the somnambulist camerawork, as creating a compelling and disturbing response to real events.

The film offers an unblinking, aesthetic look at a Columbine-like shooting that provokes thought about America's blood lust without easy answers. It blends waking-dream visuals with nightmare elements in a political and personal response to tragedy.

Van Sant's abstract, personal take on Columbine uses long languorous travelling shots and improvisation to immerse viewers in students' lives on an uneventful day that turns horrific, evoking the subjective experience of random violence more than explanation.

The movie refuses to explain the killers' motives, instead observing the final day and letting viewers draw their own conclusions. This approach drew criticism from some for being vacuous but is presented as a deliberate rejection of easy answers or scapegoating.

The film is a low-key, blankly devastating account of a day in an American high school that ends in massacre. Van Sant delivers his least show-offy, most personal and best picture in years through restless, improvised long takes and overlapping snippets of student life.

The critic praises Van Sant's sensitive, nonjudgmental approach to portraying teenagers and the film's structure that underscores the unknowability of the Columbine events through repeated perspectives and sensual details. He singles out the character Benny for throwing the film into a provocative tailspin, while noting some miscalculations in the depiction of the killers.

Van Sant's most satisfactory recent film, poetic and painterly in its mosaic of an ordinary high-school day that builds to the Columbine-style massacre without attempting to explain or psychoanalyse the perpetrators.

The critic finds Van Sant's approach evocative in summoning the enigma of school violence through absences and mise-en-scène but criticizes the explicit gay kiss between the killers as a problematic attempt at context that betrays the film's mystique.

The film is absorbing in its first half as it introduces characters through long tracking shots and clever time-folding structure, but the final section focusing on the killers feels pornographic. It remains a striking work that forces audiences to re-examine their feelings about Columbine.

The critic finds the film a disappointment that offers little new insight into teen life and the Columbine events, criticizing its clunky direction, amateur acting, and heavy-handed elements while noting it misses the target despite Cannes success.