Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Loved the irony of this movie. And the main actor has enough gaucherie to carry the whole thing off. The comedy of the class characters is really funny. Jim Broadbent's character has the cynicism to balance the movie. Perhaps the murder theme and all those involved in it goes overboard but what the heck?! I stayed with it to the end not knowing where it would lead. Unpredictable. Be prepared for surprises in this movie, that's all I can say! And Beethoven's Emperor Concerto is used to perfection.

There's something that makes me keep coming back to this film, just like Ghost World. And I keep noticing new details. There's a lot of mature observations in it that are sometimes borderline misogynist but too realistic to be called cynical.At it's worst, it spews cliché but at it's best it provides a red pill to put your feet on the ground while being funny, satirical, quick, quirky and spot on.I disagree with the criticism that it unsuccessfully attempts to mix crude college humor with a murder mystery. The crude humor is there but not to make you laugh necessarily, but to reveal vacuousness and ulterior sex-driven motives in the art world. The murder mystery serves to ultimately bring a profound message on how the world works, how much being a great artist has to do with being successful and how real love and happiness can be just out of reach. I also think Max Minghella is great with his brooding eyes. The hatred for his character is unjustified, he has a great talent for drawing, is ambitious and understandably despises the second-handers and freeloaders around him.Nice little soundtrack, sparsely dosed, finishes it. Why aren't there more Clowes/Zwigoff movies?

While browsing through IMDb, this movie caught my eye and I decided to watch it, without any expectations. The script was great (done by Daniel Clowes, the same guy who wrote Ghost World), but there was something missing. Even with great cast in supporting roles (Buscemi, Malkovich, Houston, they really delivered). I had a few good laughs, but most of the time I just didn't find the movie really convincing. It shows quite realistic situation in art schools, using lots of irony, but director could have made much better choices, making it less disconnected. At one point I felt like it turned into real cliché Hollywood C production movie. But it was an easy watch for sure.

Terry Zwigoff's films often revolve around artists. Consider "Louie Bluie", which dealt with country blues musician Howard Armstrong, or "Crumb", a macabre film produced by David Lynch which dealt with, amongst other things, the life of Robert Crub, a dysfunctional artist and illustrator who turns to art as a means of escaping emotional and physical abuse. Years later Zwigoff would direct "Ghost World", in which a young woman struggles to become an artist in a world which demands pragmatism and conformity. Problem is, our hero artist, despite being well-meaning and beautifully idealistic, is as vapid and smug as those she defines herself against.So Zwigoff's films increasingly shatter various romantic myths associated with "the artist". This is seen most clearly in "Art School Confidential", the tale of Jerome, a squeaky-clean young artist whose work demonstrates impeccable (if second-hand) technique, but is nevertheless perceived as being devoid of personality, originality and content. Indeed, Jerome's art seems personal only when he is fawning over and sketching a young woman whom he is infatuated with.In an attempt to win accolades, Jerome thus steals the "deep work" of an ostracised, morbid and hugely tortured painter (this painter's morbid art is the result of him being ignored for decades by audiences). But still Jerome and his stolen art are ignored. The public, the film goes on to say, appreciates art only insofar as there is some consistently between how the work is perceived and how the artist as a public persona is perceived. Meanwhile, a talentless cop pretends to be a painter and wins accolades for his simple paintings. The audience loves this connect between naive paintings and a naive painter. The public wants authenticity, a lack of pretence, truth...but also sensationalism. When Jerome poses as a mass murderer his stolen paintings suddenly make him an international superstar. In other words, the worth of his paintings only went up when extrinsic factors came into play: the belief that Jerome had hidden, secret, dark depths. More so than other Zwigoff films, "Art School Confidential" brims with anger. This is Zwigoff moving into bitter, Todd Solondz territory. It's a film about an art world which is deeply competitive, in which sensationalism has superseded art, in which what constitutes "good art" or "any art" is intangible and fickle and in which sham and sincerity are hard to gauge. Zwigoff is obsessed with the relationship art has to its creators, consumers and critics, but views all three with a certain amount of scorn. Critics fail to see, consumers fawn over celebrity and luridness and creators are driven by competitiveness, commerce, bitterness, ego and a pathological urge to connect back to or vengefully get back at society; to persecute others. In addition to this, all three groups fail to healthily separate artist/person from art/subject. This is art as being inherently vindictive and artists being hopelessly dysfunctional, driven by primal needs for sexual and material validation, acquisition and ownership. Like "Crumb", Zwigoff portrays artists as being bullied, vengeful and predisposed to self-hate, misogyny and misanthropy at best, and being deluded, clueless air-heads at worst. Audiences fare no better, more infatuated with serial killers and blood that anything else."Art School Confidential" is a good film, dark, funny and hits upon many truths, but Zwigoff's tone is unrelentingly grim and pessimistic. It's indicative of a certain postmodern trend. It's no longer that the universe is "meaningless, random, absurd and stupid" so lets resign to playfully making "films about meaningless, absurd and stupid universes" (Woody, Solondz, the Coens etc), but that now all art or representation of such absurdities is itself an absurd gesture. In other words, we move beyond the "it's just a joke, a game, a genre rift" of postmodernity, to an overt statement that representation itself is debased and now no longer worth it; meta-nihilism squared. "Art School Confidential" doesn't necessarily say this – it's not as anti-art as some claim – but it is representative of a growing trend.8/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Exit Through the Gift Shop", "Ghost World" and "The Shape of Things".