[In American Graffiti] Lucas and his fellow writers, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, manage to be serious without portentous symbolism or heavy underlining. They slip on an end title which they should have let the audience write for itself but, otherwise, their poise is flawless; the car crash at the end, to take the most obvious example, has not been inflated into an apocalypse. Despite its crowded sound track and its mesmerizing flow of images, American Graffiti is a low-keyed, unpretentious movie. Yet it cuts to the heart of something serious and entangling in American life….

Lucas has been amazingly thorough and technically dazzling in conjuring up this "last year of the fifties." Except for the final two sequences, the whole movie takes place after dark. Aided by his creative cast and camera crews supervised by Haskell Wexler, Lucas has spliced bits of San Francisco, San Rafael, and...