By Ed Symkus Nanette Burstein knew when she was still in high school that she wanted to direct movies. But she also knew that it wasn’ta position you just

By Karen Durbin New York Times By Karen Durbin High school can be hard to shake. Some people never make it out of the cafeteria; they're still trying to

Summing up American Teen in a few words, I would have to say "unrealistic, yet interesting." It's a documentary about teens attending high school and letting everyone watch their lives play out over a school year, but without the cameras in their faces, I don't know if director Burstein would have achieved the same resulting responsiveness of her characters. It's the chance you take when you document any subject, but I think she missed the mark in American Teen as to the teen's believability and sincerity.
The documentary follows the lives of five high school teenagers of different popularity and aspirations who in some way or another affect each other. There's Colin, a

American Teen, the new documentary about teen life directed by Nanette Burstein, lends credence to the somewhat comforting yet completely ludicrous idea that teen comedies, from John Hughes through American Pie, have high school life completely pegged. Mounted on the shoulders of four teenagers living in East Nowhere, Indiana (okay, okay, it's Warsaw, Indiana), Burstein excavates the meta-dramatic senior year of the four pre-collegiates, peppered equally with family squabbles and a carousel of break-ups, hook-ups, and almost-relationships. The four sociological archetypes are covered perfectly: A Jock, a Bitch, a Nerd and a Wild Card. As always, the insinuation is that they

By STEVE DOLLAR | July 25, 2008 When previews of "American Teen" were screened on large overhead monitors in a giant sports bar during a party at this

ALL-AMERICAN KIDS: Mitch Reinholt, left, Jake Tusing, Megan Krizmanich and Colin Clemens are featured.
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I guess what I was looking for was the sort of things we all have to go through, the insecurity of being that age, trying to figure out your identity and the heartbreak and all the emotional vulnerability that I suspected still went on when you're 17," said Burstein, 38, by phone. "And it turned out there is very much a timelessness about that. Some things had changed, but the real emotional core of what you go through at that age very much stays the same."

By AO SCOTT “American Teen” is populated by high school archetypes, kids who might have stepped out of the mists of your own adolescence or,

By Anthony Breznican But very few consciously watch a child step from adolescence to adulthood, and that's what the movie American Teen aimed to capture.

Source: AP By CHRISTY LEMIRE The documentary American Teen doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know about high school. It can be a rough time,