...it remains one of the most unsettlingly accomplished American movies of the new millennium, and exactly as difficult to categorize or definitively interpret as its maker intended.

There's much to argue with, but this unconventional, oddly beautiful film resonates in unexpected ways.

It offers a dismaying whiff of mortality in the spaces between the girls' chattering remarks in the cafeteria and in the blank eyes of boys who feel alienated from everything except the guns they cradle so lovingly in their arms.

Gus Van Sant’s Elephant earned the Palme d’Or, which says less about the movie’s merits than it does about the festival’s tiresome tendency to reward controversial films regardless of their quality.