Critic Reviews

• Scott Bowles, USA Today

  Every time it dabbles in real-world teen issues like sex and drugs, it returns to a fanciful high school where kids quote Nietzsche and play acoustic guitar on lunch breaks.

• Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

  Mario Van Peebles' self-produced project comes frustratingly close to his high-minded aims.

• Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

  Heavy-handed teen drama mixes moralizing and partying to uneven effect.

• Kyle Smith, New York Post

  A good-natured high school dramedy that borrows from many others...

• Stephanie Merry, Washington Post

  With the raunch of "American Pie" and the heart of an after-school special, the comedy turns out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts.

• Neil Genzlinger, New York Times

  Van Peebleses ... populate the movie, and all are serviceable enough as actors; it would be nice to see them in less earnest, more original material.

• Witney Seibold, CraveOnline

  I have to admit there is something kind of disarming about its corny earnestness. Van Peebles clearly invested himself in the material, and damn it all if he wasn't going to wring that screenplay for all it was worth.

• Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com

  [VIDEO] There are a few moments during writer/director Mario Van Peebles's overly didactic high school drama when you can almost glimpse the good film buried beneath all the artifice.

• David Noh, Film Journal International

  Initially promising teen comedy-drama, featuring African-American kids not in the ghetto for once, soon undermines itself in a welter of clichés and empty gloss.

• Matt Pais, RedEye

  Joining two overweight characters in a relationship just to make a joke about them enjoying an all-you-can-eat buffet hardly qualifies as progressive, intellectual comedy.

• Alison Willmore, AV Club

  How to resist a film in which one kid taunts another by quoting Mo'Nique's monologue from Precious?

• Kam Williams, AALBC.com

  Unfolding like a 21st Century update of African-American coming-of-age classics House Party (1990) and Love Jones (1997), We the Party might very well come to serve as the seminal adventure capturing the angst and aspirations of the Millennial Generation.

• Diego Costa, Slant Magazine

  While We the Party can be insensitive, or blind, to the misogyny and homophobia of the general culture (the token gay teen is a finger-snapping, head-bobbing fashionista), it takes the issues of race and class quite seriously.

Read all 13 critic reviews