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50A movie sure to reward the filmmaker's most die-hard fans, while doing little to quiet critics who found his work self-conscious to the point of insufferability.
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80Even were it not so delightful, Damsels in Distress, set at a fictional upper-crust college, would deserve a watch for its dialogue alone.
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75This is a mannered comedy, more stylized and theatrical, almost surreal at times, and less accommodating to his trademark brand of razor-sharp dialogue.
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50Damsels in Distress is shockingly tone-deaf. Stillman is still capable of a few amusing quips, but his storytelling is sophomoric.
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75The performances are all terrific - Stillman gets his actors to latch onto his absurdist vibe, then gives them wonderfully rich dialogue to play with.
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50Stillman inserts chapter headings and written asides into the proceedings, but none of it helps explain what is before us. The authorial voice in Damsels in Distress lacks definition.
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Apr 19, 201260A mixed return for Stillman, Damsels is so whimsically out of step it's like a time-travel comedy without the time travel. Fortunately, Gerwig and some dazzling dialogue save his blushes.
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63These are women who seemed raised on Louisa May Alcott and might have been aspirationally besotted with Jane Austen. But you sense tragedy looming. They're hurtling, inexorably, toward Tennessee Williams.
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50Welcome back, Whit Stillman -- with Damsels in Distress, the hipper-than-thou club is back in session.
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25You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?
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75The film treats depression and despair and young love with just enough gravity so the movie doesn't float away completely.
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75Stillman writes his own dialogue, and is a master of clever double-reverse wit.
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83In its own superannuated preppy way, Stillman's comic universe is as singular as Woody Allen's.
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Apr 6, 201288Damsels contains much that's familiar to fans of previous Stillman films such as 1990's "Metropolitan": looping jokes that build on one another, allusions to art and literature, characters who are proudly out of step with the times.
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90Damsels in Distress is deliberately and purposefully irrelevant; its irrelevance is its strength. It's zany-in-quotation-marks and also flat-out zany. I laughed until I cried, and you may too (if you don't find it pointless and teeth-grindingly irritating). Either way, Whit Stillman is back at last, bringing his peculiar brand of counterprogramming refreshment to our jaded age.
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50These are hardly damsels, but the distress will be felt by audiences watching the collection of non sequiturs, twee remarks and tangential vignettes that is Damsels in Distress.
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Apr 5, 201240Stillman too often substitutes pith for insight, until even that is drowned out by the sound of him chortling into his sleeve.
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60Just as precise and self-consciously precious as predicted. Which doesn't mean it hasn't got moments of charming wit buried under all its archness.
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70Even if it did not have other charms, this peculiar, uneven campus comedy would be worth seeing for the delightful felicity of its dialogue.
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88Welcome Damsels in Distress, an exhilarating gift of a comedy about college, the female intellect, the limitless male ego, inventing a new dance, and suicide prevention.
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70It all sounds absurd and simplistic, but I dare you to watch the joyful delirium of the big dance number, set to an old Fred Astaire tune called "Things Are Looking Up," and not to feel an unexpected sense of rosiness. This movie may contain endorphins.
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80If it's possible for a picture to be at once ideal and imperfect, then Damsels fits the bill.
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58Gerwig can't make her character come alive, though, and neither can Adam Brody as one of their neediest male cases. In the midst of the froufrou, lovely, stalklike Analeigh Tipton (Crazy, Stupid, Love) is delightful as a student who enjoys being normal and living in this century.
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Apr 3, 201270The thing that Damsels and its damsels value above all else - outside of well-timed, well-phrased, slyly deployed witticisms (Stillman hasn't lost a step) - is sure to rankle mavericks on both sides of the aisle. Forget the economy - it's about conformity, stupid.
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60How much you enjoy Damsels will depend on your tolerance for Stillman's particular brand of duct-taped Sperry Topsider whimsy. It's a comedy! It's a musical! It's a trip down memory lane to revisit the blissful confusion of our - or someone's - college years!
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80Too many movies come to us as preordained cult objects - this is the real deal.
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Apr 3, 201288The clash of styles in Damsels in Distress is bewildering and then disarming.
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70Stillman's comeback comedy Damsels in Distress is wobbly and borderline twee, but it deepens as it goes along and becomes rich.
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70Stillman proves he still knows how to write crackling, articulate dialogue for quirky preppie characters whom he loves laughing at as much as with.
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91Even though I'm not sure I understand what Stillman was going for minute-to-minute, I was swept away by how original Damsels is, and how funny.
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Apr 1, 201270Highbrow campus-comedy from long-lost Whit Stillman is a flawed but frequently hilarious comeback.
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Apr 1, 201260While the scenario has all the smirking charm of Stillman's earlier movies, the sobering realities of off-campus life are never even alluded to, and the humor of insularity eventually becomes stifling.
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70Given the earnest mayhem that prevails at your local multiplex, there is surely a place for a lightly mocking modernist with a growing distaste for the modern. [9 April 2012, p.84]