With a standout performance from lead actress Holliday Grainger, the film succeeds best when it dissects female friendship while exploring individuality in relationships.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 14, 2024

Animals ultimately celebrates the messiness of balancing relationships in your thirties.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 25, 2021

Animals proves that women know how to party hard like men and there's some real "I shouldn't be laughing at this but I can't help it" moments.

| Feb 3, 2021

A beautiful, consistently funny yet devastating, mediation on modern love and friendship.

| Nov 16, 2020

Regardless of their gender, most people will see something of their current, or former, selves in Laura and Tyler - and the only thing left to decide is whether to party on or get off the ride.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 6, 2020

Hyde's film really immerses you into the world of Laura and Tyler but not as an audience, but as a participant.

| Jan 29, 2020

Sensual and beautifully textured. Hyde watches with tenderness but resists melodrama ... steering us gently towards the revelation that something more atavistic binds these two women.

| Dec 11, 2019

Director [Sophie] Hyde crafts Animals into a mostly joyous ode to female friendship, rolling along on a sparkling, witty script that buzzes with energy and feeling.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 21, 2019

[A] spirited, punchy tale that sparkles with a heady mix of confident youthful enthusiasm and dark sardonic humour.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 10, 2019

Animals is also further proof of the filmmaking talents of Australian director Sophie Hyde.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 9, 2019

A gorgeous, sometimes bitterly on the nose evocation of the choices women face when they want to grow up but can't stop having fun, Animals is a bold film in love with its two firebrand female leads.

| Oct 2, 2019

Buoyed by Unsworth's often-snappy dialogue, it's a film that exudes genuine warmth, even as it grapples with the realities of growing up and growing apart, and the ugly anxieties that come with being a modern, middle-class woman no longer in her twenties.

| Sep 16, 2019

This untamed depiction of female friendship moves beyond basic binaries of freedom and control.

| Sep 16, 2019

The strong chemistry between the two leads (Holliday Grainger & Alia Shawkat), who had apparently never met before being cast, drive the film as Laura and Tyler try coping with the changing circumstances that beset their change-averse lifestyles.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 15, 2019

...the film is a very watchable study of two women as they begin to realise the second F in BFF is an impossible promise.

| Sep 14, 2019

Director Sophie Hyde's keen take on the clashing paradoxes of woman and sister-hood is tender, awkward, confronting and illuminating.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2019

It's a tribute to [director] Sophie Hyde's work that these two gals, with tinkling white wine glasses and cackling laughter, become fully engaging women on screen.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 10, 2019

Adelaide's Sophie Hyde... directs this Irish-Australian coproduction, based on Emma Jane Unsworth's 2014 novel, with a sure-but-sensitive hand.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 9, 2019

Significantly hipper, more thoughtful and more nuanced than your typical RomCom, while being significantly tamer, more formulaic and more commercially-minded than Hyde's previous film 52 Tuesdays.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 5, 2019

Animals is a spirited though often sad examination of female friendship, and a friendship's end; the hangover that arrives no matter how endless the fun seemed.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 4, 2019