| Neon | Release Date (Streaming): June 5, 2020 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
38
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jun 3, 2020
The uniquely talented director Josephine Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”) and the screenwriter Sarah Gubbins (adapting a 2014 novel by Susan Scarf Merrell) have teamed up with a two-generational quartet of fine actors to create one of the most visually arresting and intellectually provocative films of the year.
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Nov 10, 2020
Though the slow, blurry-edged stupor of Shirley will not be to everyone’s tastes, it cannot be denied that it examines its subject, and a rather tired genre, with feverish, dreamlike fluidity rather than rigid biography. That, and Moss’ enthralling lead performance, are Shirley’s chief accomplishments.
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Jun 5, 2020
Shirley was clearly intended for the film-festival circuit, offering a narrowly pitched story where it's easy to admire the performances without feeling like the journey adds up to much. While Moss captures the complexity of Shirley's personality, the movie sheds scant light on the underlying why of it all.
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Jun 4, 2020
Decker succeeds in transporting viewers inside the mind of a tortured genius. With its mesmerizing cinematography, a deliciously waspy script, and fantastic performances, Shirley is a smart and intricately woven look at a woman’s struggle to create in a world telling her to be something else.
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Jan 27, 2020
The plot, admittedly, is scattered; this is par for the course for Decker, but in a movie with more conventional bones, the shagginess sticks out. Shirley gorgeously invokes its subject’s style, however, via a disarmingly off-kilter score; handheld camerawork that gets intimate with characters’ psyches; and, most strikingly, a series of unforgettable images that intensify this study of female awakening and decay.
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Jan 28, 2020
It’s Odessa Young that does much of the heavy lifting acting-wise, though overshadowed by Moss, as she is the one who ultimately transforms throughout the story. It wouldn’t be fair to leave out director Decker’s visual vision for the film or Sarah Gubbins’ screenplay as they continually keep you off balance from the start and second-guessing almost everyone and everything to the end.
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Jun 4, 2020
To some extent, Shirley delights in its own dissembling, but it also uses these complications to arrive at a place of startling truth. The sorcery in which Jackson claimed to dabble in real life finds a cinematic corollary in the movie’s bewitching late passages, which are by turns disorienting and illuminating.
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Jun 5, 2020
Jun 5, 2020
There is an immediacy to the film so rare in period biopics and such a tactile physicality to its intellectual gymnastics. By the time Shirley draws to a close, you end up feeling pleasingly spent, like you just stayed up all night drinking a bottle of Canadian Club while discussing literary theory with a dear old confidant you hadn’t seen in years. Some friends just tire you out like that, and they are almost always the best kind.
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RogerEbert.comJun 3, 2020
Jun 3, 2020
Shirley is slow and uneventful, but intermittently interesting, and Moss is great. In the end, what tips Shirley into the realm of recommendation is that Moss will be the only thing anyone remembers of the movie. That means that, even if it’s only an OK experience, it should last as a good memory.
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Feb 25, 2020
Shirley will find an eager audience at a cultural moment which increasingly values emotional expression. But many will find the film an over-rich brew that arguably stresses Jackson’s visionary inspiration at the expense of the craft, canniness and lucidity of a writer whose work was characterised by supreme control, even if her troubled life wasn’t.
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The Film StageJan 27, 2020
The GuardianJan 26, 2020
There’s a lot here to digest, a bitter cocktail with many confounding flavours and its abrasiveness will prove tough-going for some, especially those in search of a more polite and familiarly structured literary biopic. But for those willing to sink into the depths with Shirley, it’s a delicious journey down.
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Jan 26, 2020
Gubbins’ script is tart, verbally lively and neatly constructed, while director Josephine Decker, in her first outing since her well-received 2018 Sundance entry Madeline’s Madeline, keeps a very tight rein on things, adroitly mixing in tension, innuendo and dark humor to keep the drama at a satisfying low boil most of the way.
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Jun 1, 2020
Shirley, by contrast, coats her in gothic excess as if glazing a ham, and of her humor scarcely a shred remains. As a sworn devotee of “Airplane!,” I found myself praying that once — just once — she would utter the words “And don’t call me Shirley,” thus rending the veil of gloom from top to bottom. Sadly, it was not to be.
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Jun 4, 2020
For all its verbal combat, and marital strife that’s echoed and amplified by a younger academic couple in the manner of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” the story works best when the dialogue tides subside. In those fleeting moments Ms. Moss is able to convey, eloquently and almost wordlessly, a tormented soul.
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