Metacritic reviews

Paris Is Burning is the most passionately empathetic piece of documentary filmmaking I’ve seen since Streetwise, the brilliant portrait of homeless teens in Seattle, and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II, Penelope Spheeris’ sly and galvanizing heavy-metal collage.

Wildly entertaining, deeply humanitarian and fundamentally educational film.

As much a movie about class, race, and sexual orientation as anything you've ever seen.

Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's brilliantly entertaining documentary look into the New York subculture of drag queens and transsexuals, is a rapturous, desperate ode to self-invention.

Paris Is Burning encapsulates New York at the end of the '80s, examining how a group of outcasts made a home there, using theft and ingenuity.

Touching and funny eye-opener of a documentary.

One emerges from this film not only with a new vocabulary and a fresh way of viewing the straight world but with a bracing object lesson in understanding what society “role models” are all about.

What I saw was a successful attempt by the outsiders to dramatize how success and status in the world often depend on props you can buy, or steal, almost anywhere - assuming you have the style to know how to use them.

Miss Livingston's interviews reveal a way of living that is both highly structured and self-protective.

A poignant, heartfelt tribute to a vibrant New York subculture and its flamboyant acolytes, captured on grainy celluloid, shortly before it got appropriated and streamlined by the mainstream.