Girls Town is more timeless than timely. It’s dressed in painfully ‘90s garb, but the themes it explores and the language it speaks resonate louder now than they did on its original release in 1996.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 14, 2025

McKay's film does more than just sensationalize this subject -- it explores it with intensity, authenticity, and intelligence, leaving the questions it probes and raised unresolved and challenging.

| Nov 14, 2024

[Girls Town] resorts to clichés but makes the clichés workable and believable. Taylor, in particular, is magnificent.

| Nov 14, 2024

At its best, Girls Town has a scalding vigor and spontaneity, a real sense of the streets. At its worst -- which is far too often -- it's just as shallow, violent and cliché-ridden as the big-budget movies whose excesses its makers want to correct.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 14, 2024

Girls Town walks the walk, talks to the talk -- and fights the good fight.

| Nov 14, 2024

A story more or less made up by the actors as they went along. This adds vivid spontaneity, but it makes the strongest actor stand out more than she should, and it makes the movie disjointed to the point of incoherence.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 14, 2024

Although Girls Town has moments that border on the moral didacticism of an afterschool special, these too are leavened by the actresses' honest, hard-hitting portrayals.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 14, 2024

The moments of retaliation give Girls Town bursts of energy but otherwise McKay's film crawls along. As always, Taylor gives her all, and both Grace and Harris also have their moments.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 14, 2024

If actor Steve Buscemi is the king of independent movies, Lili Taylor is the queen. And when you see the pain, passion and resilience she conveys as Patti, fighting back in Girls Town, you'll know why.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 14, 2024

Girls Town earns points for its subject matter. But a movie must have more than good intentions to win us over; it should provide a fresh look at the world around us. Here, Girls Town falls short.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 14, 2024

Girls Town seethes with riot-grrl energy and audacity, and -- like its heroes -- it has an impudent, funky grunge style all its own.

| Nov 14, 2024

Girls Town is an actor's picture, which is its most important achievement and also explains its own weakness, which is lack of a compelling story, but it takes a shrewd, hard-working director to make this sort of experiment in realism look so easy.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 14, 2024

The viewer has no better sense of where life will take them after the closing credits roll. If the point is that life has ragged edges, however, the movie itself is admirably compact.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 14, 2024

Jim McKay's well-intentioned low-budget picture could've benefited from a little of that ol' MGM spit and polish. The film, which is semi-improvised, means to be spontaneous and passionate, but the result is often unfocused and monotonous.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 14, 2024

Fine performances from the cast lend the characters a sense of realism... Add McKay's stylish direction and the pounding soundtrack, and you have a movie that young women in particular will really connect with.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 14, 2024

It’s a power house. Shot in 12 days in Hackensack, N.J., this low-budget debut by Jim McKay is a remarkable script collaboration between McKay and the three actresses who play high school seniors shocked into evaluating their lives.

| Sep 3, 2024

Girls Town is a serious film, even demanding in the complexity of its people and their relationships, yet it gets a steady stream of laughs. Truly, Girls Town... captures the human comedy.

| Sep 3, 2024

It is outspoken, unpolished, and easily the most realistic movie ever made about the lives of young women.

| Feb 26, 2020

| Original Score: B | Sep 7, 2011

Girls Town Subverts the Patriarchy.

| Sep 1, 2009