lito15 Was expecting to laugh my ass off, all I got was 2 hours wasted. Maybe it was a good film in 2001, but after watching it in 2018 all I can say it's not even a cult movie. Wanna see a good cult movie just watch The Big Lebowski, Reservoir Dogs, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Please don't waste your time it's not worth it

MartinHafer "Ghost World" is not a film for everyone. Its characters are certainly unusual but not necessarily crowd-pleasers. It also features a vague ending...something which most film viewers would not appreciate.Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) just graduated from high school. However, they are far from the typical 17-18 year-olds. In many ways, they are like hipster versions of Daria (from the wonderful cartoon series)...but with a darker, nastier edge to them. They don't fit in with those around them and seem to enjoy giggling among themselves about how stupid and ridiculous everyone else is. However, through the course of the film, these two sullen young ladies who try very hard not to care find themselves caring. Rebecca finds a job and Enid invests her energy in a social outcast, Seymour (Steve Buscemi). All the while, their own relationship with each other becomes strained...mostly because their lives now are taking different directions. This film features some truly terrific acting. While Scarlett Johansson went on to great fame, the real stand out in this one is Thora Birch...who since has had a respectable but much more low profile career in pictures. The script also is very nice, with some interesting characters. I particularly thought the art teacher (Illeana Douglass) was fascinating...mostly because she was so very, very monumentally flawed as a human being. But it also suffers a bit because it's so very hard to care about these young ladies...at least until much later in the film. It would be easy to dislike them and just turn off the picture...which would be a mistake. A challenging and odd film...but worth seeing if you are patient and are looking for something different.

Rameshwar IN Reviewed April 2012Though treads on a familiar path, never come across a teen movie with so much wit and introspection into teen angst and all of this done in a surprisingly lighter tone. Enid (Thora Birch) and Becky (Scarlett Johansson) are childhood friends who just finished high school and are planning to move into an apartment. Both are mischievous and rebellious, Enid more than Becky and decides to call on a personal ad what seemed to be from a lonely man. They ask the ad placer to come to a specific restaurant and enjoy the disappointment of the man one Seymour (Steve Buscemi) who waits and leaves. Enid gets interested in Seymour and gets to know him and becomes friends. On her personal front, she is conflicted with her own ideas and makes some poor decisions making her lose the scholarship, Becky, Seymour's friendship and a chance to move into the apartment. How she copes with all this forms the entire story. Without knowing anything about the movie the initial 15 minutes hinted this as a girl version of Superbad. It changes soon getting more intimate on what is happening in a teenager's mind who is resorting to pride when there is a feeling of being left out. Scarlett Johansson looks stunning but she does not have a lot of role here as Thora Birch is the star. Though there is no scope here for great acting, she does a terrific job portraying the troubled teenager. The director deals with this delicate subject with steady and confident hands never toning down the spirit of a teenager. Buscemi does his character with ease as a lonely weird stranger.Never boring or awkward (as most teenage movies tend to), tells a simple story in the most effective way it is possible to.

Robert J. Maxwell It's a spiritual quest masquerading as a romantic drama masquerading as a teen comedy about two girl just out of high school.The girls are Scarlett Johansson with stunning features, a voice that occasionally croaks, and a mammoth bosom; and Thora Birch, a pudgy Jewish girl with glasses that define her as a loser. The two friends wander about the boulevards and empty residential areas of Los Angeles, making vulgar wisecracks to the weirdos they run into. There is, for instance, an old man sitting at a bus stop, waiting for a bus whose route was canceled years ago. "That's what you think," he replies.The girls are very close, as only two people who hate everyone around them can be close. But their interests diverge when they run into a weirdo whose weirdness awakes a dormant thirst for something beautiful and entirely different in Birch, but not in Johansson, who prefers disgust.The catalyst is Steve Buscemi. The girls play a rather nasty prank on him. He's a pathetic loner with an eccentric obsession -- traditional jazz records. He sells them on Saturdays in a kid of front-yard souk. The girls twit him, asking if he has any Hindi rock music. Birch prefers heavy metal but she buys an old record from him anyway, out of curiosity, and finds herself moved by an old blues song.We see less of Johansson and her bosom as the movie follows Birch's blossoming attraction to Buscemi, who lives in a room that resembles a museum of hundred-year-old vernacular art. If self esteem could be measured, Buscemi's would register in the negative range. As Birch's home life become less tolerable, she plans to move in with Buscemi but changes her mind. Buscemi, almost against his will, takes up with a woman his own age, Stacy Travis, who is enough to disentangle any man from his affair with a portly teen ager.I don't think I'll describe the ending. Well, maybe I will. That old man sitting at the bus stop, waiting for the bus that will never come? It comes. And he gets on it and goes. Having lost everything, Thora Birch watches another bus come. She gets on it and goes.I'm sure the arrival and departure of the bus was symbolic but I don't know of what. After bouncing like a pinball between life at home, the dissolution of a warm friendship, and her affair with Buscemi, she hasn't really found anything. Rather, she's lost it. She hasn't developed a taste for blues. There really isn't anything left but disappointment and despair.All the performances are fine. No one is better than anyone else, although Bob Balaban, as Birch's indulgent father, has the best comic lines. The story is full of color and repulsion. I wish the writer, Daniel Clowes, had imagined a less allegorical end to it because that final scene just doesn't fit.At any rate, this is several steps above the expected trash about teens, sex, love, ambition, etc. I mean, it isn't, say, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."