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91Sean Baker's singular little ultra-indie is a strikingly unsentimental study in female friendship between unmoored souls in L.A.'s bleached, glamour-challenged San Fernando Valley.
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90The bright sun that blasts through Starlet, a thrillingly, unexpectedly good American movie about love and a moral awakening, bathes everything in a radiant light, even the small houses with thirsty lawns and dusty cars.
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90A mismatched-friends drama whose overall sensitivity is belied by a couple of clumsily contrived plot points, Sean Baker's Starlet pairs story and setting perfectly.
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83The story retains an inscrutable tone that sometimes makes its emotional qualities feel remote, but it still delivers a powerful message about the challenge of self-diagnosis by rooting it in universal experience
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80It's a character study about faith in connectedness, with an unforced love for cross-generational companionship that's special indeed.
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80Starlet shows enough of her unbalanced, unsustainable situation to make sense of her connection to Sadie, however frail a ballast her new friend might be. Their need for each other is disarmingly sweet, but far from sticky.
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75Starlet sneaks up on you. Set in the same sun-dried, strip-malled precincts of the San Fernando Valley where "Boogie Nights" took place - and set, in part, in that same porn industry milieu - Sean Baker's low-key, low-budget indie traces the relationship that develops between a young actress and an isolated, elderly woman.
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75It's an odd film in some ways. The porn milieu is detailed in ways at once sparing, in terms of actual screen time, and bluntly explicit. The odd-couple relationship guiding the story has its familiarities. But where it counts, 'Starlet' ... allows its characters room to maneuver within the potential cliches.
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75The film itself deserves praise for its portraits of these two women and the different worlds they inhabit.
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75Convincing performances from Hemingway and the charmingly crabby Johnson and an unhurried pace ensure that Baker's film achieves its modest goals.
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75Starlet is an interesting effort from indie filmmaker Sean Baker (this is his fourth feature), and signals the arrival of Dree Hemingway as one to watch.
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75Starlet is an unusually subtle, quiet character study - especially given the potentially salacious subject matter - that builds to a quietly powerful climax.
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70Director Sean Baker, co-writing his fourth feature with Chris Bergoch, does some deft balancing of his own: His genuine admiration for these two women extends to their idiosyncrasies, yet they never become fools, whores, saints, or coots.
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70Though named after a party girl's pet Chihuahua, Starlet could just as easily describe the two exceptional first-timers making their debuts in this brittle, beautifully understated San Fernando Valley character study.
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63Jane's friendship with Sadie is the one thing that cuts through the numbness - though the film's so low-key, even emotional revelations feel pretty muted.
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63The film works as a charming aesthetic exercise with its jerky camera and inadvertent cuts, as a contemplation on intergenerational female bonding.
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60Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel, commits to some unnecessary nudity, but also impresses with her subtlety.
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50The relationship is the best thing about the film, which otherwise feels hopelessly sad and tawdry.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 3
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Mixed: 1 out of 3
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Negative: 0 out of 3
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8
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This little ultra indie is strikingly unsentimental.