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

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

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

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

| Original Score: B | Sep 7, 2011

As a male writer-director, McKay proves to be extremely sensitive to the feeling and words of working-class women (Lili Taylor among them), determined to establish their self-worth as well as to fight against the social ills of the oppressive system

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 9, 2006

Taylor, Harris and Grace come up with some watchable, genuine moments. But they're often too involved in themselves; the movie indulges them too much.

| Jul 24, 2002

I would like to see another movie in three or four years, about what has happened to these angry, gifted friends.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Constructed without a traditional denouement, Girls Town will nevertheless satisfy viewers who want something that feels more like life than like art.

| Jan 1, 2000

Features good work from its performers.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

A welcome little gust of teen-age realism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 1, 2000

The film portrays an often-disenfranchised group with compassion, respect, and humor.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

The performances and the film's plausible handling of an unusual movie subject make Girls Town special.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

| Original Score: B | Jun 1, 1995