GirlhoodMovie Reviews

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Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.

  • 100
    New York Daily News | Elizabeth Weitzman

    Garbus spent three years patiently mining for beauty in the ugliest of environments. The remarkable result stands as a challenge to anyone who would have seen only the worst and walked right by. Read full review

  • 80
    Village Voice | Laura Sinagra

    Despite similar excess, Garbus's follow-up to 2002's "The Execution of Wanda Jean" provides another powerful glimpse inside the American justice system. Read full review

  • 75
    Boston Globe | Wesley Morris

    Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus spent three years shooting two teenagers living in a Maryland juvenile detention center. The completed film is called Girlhood and it feels as much a work in progress as its two troubled subjects do. Read full review

  • 70
    Washington Post | Michael O'Sullivan

    Sobering yet faintly optimistic documentary. Read full review

  • 70
    New York Magazine | Peter Rainer

    A fine example of what a filmmaker can achieve when she takes on a great subject and lets it play out with all the respect and attention it deserves. Read full review

  • 70
    The Onion A.V. Club | Noel Murray

    Garbus knows how to catch people at their most open, as they define their own types and simultaneously transcend them. Read full review

  • 70
    The New York Times | Stephen Holden

    As spare as the juvenile institution in which much of it was filmed. As you watch it, you wish the film would fill in more of each girl's background. Read full review

  • 60
    The Hollywood Reporter |

    An eye-opening sociological examination that is alternately moving and tedious. Read full review

  • 60
    Variety | Joe Leydon

    Grim but engrossing. Read full review

  • 50
    Los Angeles Times | Manohla Dargis

    The impulse to end on an "up" note, to turn complex and contradictory lives into palatable narratives, is one of the least-examined pitfalls in nonfiction filmmaking. But in her attempt to give their lives a shape that the girls themselves seem to resist, this talented filmmaker has done both herself and them a disservice. Read full review

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