Paranoid Park

A teenage skateboarder in Portland accidentally causes a security guard's death near the railway tracks and tells nobody. The film is not interested in the crime so much as in how it sits in an adolescent's mind, scattered and out of sequence, which is how the narrative is arranged. Gus Van Sant wrote the script from Blake Nelson's novel in two days. He cast largely through MySpace, with more than 2,900 people auditioning. Gabe Nevins, in the lead, was a skateboarder with no acting experience, and Van Sant chose him precisely for an innocence he believed trained actors lacked. Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li shot it. Doyle used the wide-angle lenses of skate videos, and the skating sequences were filmed on Super 8 because that was skate culture's own recording medium. It premiered at Cannes in 2007, won the 60th anniversary prize and was nominated for the Palme d'Or, and took Best Director and Best Cinematography from the Boston Society of Film Critics. Metacritic sits at 84. On a 3 million dollar budget it grossed 4.5 million. Who it is for: viewers who like formal experiment and films that describe adolescence without words. Who it is not for: anyone expecting professional performances. The acting is deliberately flat, which some read as disengagement.