AllMovie

Young Manhattan-based director Whit Stillman's fame rests on a single auteur effort, which happened to be his very first film. 1990's Metropolitan was a remarkable Eric Rohmer-like character piece about the fading debutante scene in New York. Stillman's visual style needed work, but he exhibited a marvelous fly-on-the-wall ear for the way Privileged Youth talks and interacts. Whit Stillman earned an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of Metropolitan, quite a coup for what was essentially a non-mainstream independent project.