Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.
Written and directed by David Riker, who built his 1998 drama "La Ciudad" around immigrants in New York City, The Girl is stingy with backstory but rich with visual clues. Read full review
Hernandez is soulful and affecting, though, and Cornish embodies Ashley's self-centered character with nuance and subtlety. Read full review
Anyone who finds this conclusion a humanistic or socially reprehensible dealbreaker can hardly be faulted. Before these questionable issues come to a head and then falter in the finale, there is a lot of value in The Girl. Read full review
The Girl sounds like a real mess. It isn’t. It’s just a slow, well-made human interest story on a very small scale, ultimately touching but as inconsequential as a slice of pineapple at a Hawaiian luau. Read full review
Uses the perils of immigrating to this country without papers as a backdrop for a poor white American woman's bumpy path to enlightenment. Read full review
Writer-director David Riker's film is tough going, but worth it. Read full review
There are moving moments as Cornish channels the slow self-enlightenment necessary for Ashley's character arc. And the actress is particularly good in the scenes with the promising young Hernandez. Read full review
In The Girl, writer/director David Riker returns to many of the same themes he pursued in his award-winning 1998 film "La Ciudad," which told the stories of four Hispanic immigrants living in New York City. Immigration is still very much on Riker’s mind, although he approaches it from a very different perspective this time. Read full review
In all aspects, The Girl can’t help it — this is headline-torn cinema du tearjerking at its most generic. Read full review
If the poor really interested such filmmakers, these movies would have something to offer other than lugubriousness masquerading as seriousness, and clichés presented as hard truths. Read full review