- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
91It's quietly brutal stuff, beautifully acted by Fanning, Englert, Christina Hendricks and a word-twisting Alessandro Nivola.
-
91A viscerally charged movie that foregrounds surface tensions and gripping performances, Ginger and Rosa is the filmmaker's most accessible and technically surefooted work to date.
-
Mar 13, 201383A touching drama from British art-house filmmaker Sally Potter, who broke through to wider audiences with 1992's "Orlando" and has now made her most mainstream movie yet.
-
83Beautiful, yet dark and moving, unsparing, but told with a sympathetic eye, Ginger & Rosa is sometimes relentless in its examination of emotional pain.
-
80Fanning is nearly perfect as Ginger navigates choppier waters than most teens have to. There is not a false note in her performance; no matter how melodramatic things become, everything about Ginger remains genuine.
-
80Ms. Fanning, who is younger than her character, shows a nearly Streepian mixture of poise, intensity and technical precision. It is frightening how good she is and hard to imagine anything she could not do.
-
80This is a teenage movie that could in other hands have been precious; instead it has delicacy and intelligence.
-
75Suffused with enormous compassion for the young woman at its center, this parable of awakenings shares some DNA with the art house hit “An Education” but has little of that movie’s nods to cozy humor and happy endings.
-
75Sally Potter's twin interests - in grand world movements and in the grand internal movements in people lives - are effectively brought to bear in Ginger & Rosa, her best film of the decade.
-
75In Fanning, Potter has found the perfect vessel, and the miracle is that the actress doesn’t even seem to be trying. She just is.
-
75It's a portrait of a time and place, characters keeping company around a simple kitchen table, and the helplessness adolescents feel when faced with the priorities of those in power. What I'll take away from it is the knowledge that now the Fannings have given us two actresses of such potential.
-
75There’s not a bad performance in the bunch. Hendricks’ and Fanning’s Brit accents are nicely un-showy.
-
75An intriguingly complex portrait of both of its characters and of the time of flux they live in.
-
Feb 25, 201375With Ginger & Rosa, Sally Potter manages to avoid nearly every pratfall of such period pieces, focusing on extreme alienation rather than enlightenment, and wringing a powerful and jaundiced coming-of-age story from the decade's less trod corners.
-
70It's an adult look at the teenage years, an examination of how personal emotions inform political action, a noteworthy change of pace for writer-director Sally Potter and, most of all, the showcase for a performance by Elle Fanning as Ginger that is little short of phenomenal.
-
70Ms. Englert's performance isn't as interesting as it might have been if the writing hadn't favored Ginger. But Ms. Fanning, a young actress of seemingly unerring instincts, is a wonder.
-
70The film’s small scale is more than compensated for by its insights into adolescent awareness, the passions stoked by global causes and the moral hypocrisy of the ideologically righteous.
-
67The movie can be affecting at times, and might’ve been even more so if Potter hadn’t made its theme so explicit, via heavy “this is the point” speeches delivered during what’s otherwise a powerful climax.
-
63Potter’s film is at is most artful in the painterly ways she composes the wordless scenes of the girls testing cigarettes, hitchhiking with the wrong boys and Rosa exploring heavy petting with another boy, showing off for Ginger.
-
60In its closing minutes Potter restores the calmer observational tone and mood that distinguish much of Ginger & Rosa, providing a lovely summation of its main character's age-appropriate contradictions.
-
60The most heart-wrenching thing about the film is watching Fanning’s transformation from idealist to wreck, the father’s free-thinking daughter turned into the mother’s double in the space of a dinner argument. It’s not quite enough for a film, but it is for one magnificent scene.
-
60Spearheaded by a strikingly self-assured turn from Elle Fanning, this ’60s-set coming-of-ager follows two teenage girls whose bond starts to crumble under the emotional and political pressures of adulthood.
-
50Ginger & Rosa never matches the freshness of its young star.
-
40There's not much meat to the story. So while the picture on the menu suggests filet mignon, we really get mostly fish-and-chips stuff.
-
40Despite some strong moments, Ginger and Rosa fails to really convince.
-
40Potter seems at a loss to communicate the ideas behind her agonizingly elliptical picture, leaving auds to marvel at the gorgeous cinematography and scarlet-red hair of its heroine, earnestly played by Elle Fanning in a project undeserving of her talents.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 1 out of 3
-
Mixed: 1 out of 3
-
Negative: 1 out of 3
-
5
-
This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.