The film sets just the right tone: with inventive music choices and wonderfully piquant moments plucked from what must have been hundreds of hours of footage, Frontrunners is consistently entertaining.
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10/24/08
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Frontrunners (2008)
88 %
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Reviews Counted: 24
Fresh: 21
Rotten:3
Average Rating: 7/10
Consensus: Frontrunners offers poignant insights into the high school power structure, with more than a few parallels to the current U.S. election.
Theatrical Release: Oct 15, 2008 Limited
Synopsis: Frontrunners is a smart and funny political documentary that follows the student council presidential campaign at one of the country’s most prestigious public high schools: Stuyvesant High School in New York City. An... [More]
Director: Caroline Suh
Reviews for Frontrunners
Top Critic Perhaps it's the bright, decent, appealing kids seen here, or just the idyllic portrait Suh paints of student life at Manhattan's prestigious Stuyvesant High School that gives the picture its charm.
10/24/08
Top Critic The kids now know how to play the game of college admissions, but they seem more jaded by their knowledge than entitled to success. And their exasperation with the process, their peers, and themselves is endlessly, illuminatingly watchable.
10/24/08
Top Critic Sure, it's a skewed view through adolescent eyes, but it's one that still speaks to the aspirations, agendas, image-making and spin control behind a real, grown-up political election.
10/23/08
Top Critic The student election plays out as a microcosm of the race for the Oval Office.
10/17/08
Top Critic These candidates work hard and play fair, and when they screw up or slack off, they accept the consequences without complaint. Simply because, they believe, that's the way things should be done.
10/17/08
Top Critic what makes the movie fascinating is the particulars of the campaigns, from the way the candidates consider how to choose a running mate that will appeal to the right cliques, to how a win would improve their chances to get into a top college.
10/17/08
Suh reassures us that democracy is alive and well (dispelling the myth of the apathetic young voter), while making us pause to consider the kind of people who emerge from the system.
10/17/08
In sum, Frontrunners is like the famous New Yorker magazine cover that shows the Big Apple looming in the foreground and the rest of the country as insignificant specks in the distance.
10/17/08
an ebullient celebration of the arcane democratic impulse in this country
10/17/08
A simply-made yet entertaining doc that has a similar appeal as Alexander Payne's Election while following in the vein of docs like American Teen and Spellbound.
10/17/08
If you're looking for meaningful parallels with the current monumental election don't bother, but it's hard not to enjoy a movie where the primary pundit sports a Flava Flav t-shirt.
10/16/08
Ultimately, pic's fascination lies with the personalities and strategies of the candidates themselves.
10/16/08
Top Critic Frontrunners is a perfect antidote to the current overly staged presidential election spectacle. It shames the dishonest teen portrait of the recent doc American Teen.
10/15/08
Without forcing comparisons, Frontrunners finds parallels between the election at Stuyvesant High and the current national election.
10/15/08
Top Critic These politicians may be teens, but they grapple with constituencies, campaign strategies, and demands on their time with a spirit and seriousness of purpose suitable for the highest office in the land.
10/15/08
Top Critic Frontrunners is a decent chronicle of one small-scale local runoff; expect anything more, and you’ll feel like you’ve just entered the spin zone.
10/15/08
Tactfully [keeps] away from actual policy details and emotionally sticky stuff, cutting for punchlines, and overlaying campaigning montages with a playlist shuffle of kazoo-whimsical indie feyness.
10/15/08
Top Critic The film is clearly intended as a microcosm of the US presidential elections, although the students' cutthroat tactics are bush-league in comparison.
10/13/08
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October 05, 2008:
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