Critic Reviews

• Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  If you think one summer in the lives of three skate punks in a sunny Southern California Podunk wouldn't make a fresh, engaging documentary, "Only the Young" is here to prove you wrong.

• Robert Koehler, Variety

  The helmers find consistently invigorating camera angles and a smooth editing scheme, despite what was surely a raft of footage.

• David Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle

  A charming, aimless film about the aimless. It plays like a nuanced MTV reality show (an oxymoron, perhaps, but you get the idea).

• Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

  Co-directors Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims show genuine affection for their subjects but, despite some evocative visuals, never zero in on an involving structure or narrative.

• Farran Smith Nehme, New York Post

  Directors Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet let their subjects meander, and instead unify their movie through tight control of tone, winding up with an elegiac portrait of teen America.

• Manohla Dargis, New York Times

  A sketchbook of a documentary filled with adolescent bodies groping, lurching and skateboarding toward burgeoning adulthood.

• Kimberley Jones, Austin Chronicle

  In a slim 72 minutes, it heart-tethers us to these teenagers, paying tribute to their unique and private selves while allowing the audience to see its own reflection in them.

• Matthew Odam, Austin American-Statesman

  Only the Young is an original and handsome work that belies the age of the two young filmmakers behind it.

• Brent Simon, Shared Darkness

  Swollen with sensitivity and sentiment -- a delicate coming-of-age snapshot which locates the unextinguished youth in all of us.

• Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru

  Captures the essence of modern teenage life with warmth, honesty, humor and compassion. It's equally endearing, relatable and entertaining.

• Andrew Schenker, Slant Magazine

  Tippet and Mims's achievement is to reveal that culture, subtly, achingly, by allowing those who grew up under its influence to live and narrate their lives in the only terms they know.

• Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters

  Only the Young appreciates what it means to be young, to be naïve and also skeptical, to have expectations and to resist them.

• Mike D'Angelo, AV Club

  It's not so much a documentary as a gentle, probing character study, cherishable in direct proportion to how lightly it wears its ambition.

Read all 13 critic reviews