Rather than interrogate disability stereotypes, Chemical Hearts employs them to stunting effect.

| Original Score: C | Feb 14, 2025

The two leads are really good together... as their friendship and relationship grow, we feel the emotional rollercoaster of adolescence. While it's frustrating and sometimes annoying, it does feel genuine.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 19, 2023

A story of teenage love, unplanned and misunderstood.

| Dec 26, 2022

Lili Reinhart is good, but it’s Austin Abrams who stands out playing a likeable and real character.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 23, 2022

Chemical Hearts opens up the formula and gears it towards free will and the only certainty that adolescence brings -- it isn't an ideal stage, can't foresee what you'll learn from it, but it is fleeting... [Full review in Spanish]

| Nov 22, 2022

Chemical Hearts is certainly one of the least eye-roll-inducing efforts the genre has produced in recent memory, but that doesn’t mean it is a recommendable one.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 2, 2022

At its best, Chemical Hearts reminds us of how painful young love can be and how much we miss those days of secretly kissing in the library or walking home from school with your friends.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 10, 2021

I have a feeling the book is better than the movie.

| Original Score: C- | Jun 24, 2021

A fitfully effective teen melodrama that ultimately focuses on the wrong person. Why should I care about the young man in love with a young woman, when then young woman's story is so much more interesting?

| Mar 30, 2021

Part of what makes the teens years so fertile for storytelling is that they're a natural site of evolution. Teenagers are literally changing while the narratives around them metaphorically follow suit.

| Mar 19, 2021

This is a tale that knows how to hit you right in the feels.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 22, 2021

Romance tinged with tragedy is a staple of young adult movies in recent years, and Chemical Hearts fits in with the best of them. It never tries to be much more than what it needs to be, delivering a story that touches the heart in multiple ways.

| Feb 5, 2021

[I]n trying to make a profound statement, it seems to struggle with its tone and its characters.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Feb 1, 2021

If your bad poetry from high school about unrequited love was made into a film, it would be Chemical Hearts, an angsty young adult mope fest that beats the cliches of teenage soap operas to a plaid-wearing, meet-in-an-abandoned-factory pulp.

| Jan 27, 2021

"Chemical Hearts" flatlines on all levels of storytelling.

| Original Score: 2.0/4.0 | Nov 27, 2020

Chemical Hearts is a journey of self-discovery that captures the thrills, disappointments and confusion of being a teenager.

| Sep 22, 2020

It's by turns, confusing, exhilarating, depressing, and deflating. But then again, so is high school.

| Original Score: B | Sep 17, 2020

Chemical Hearts may not distinguish itself among the glut of movies about sensitive high-schoolers enjoying romance and emotional challenges, but its leads have charm and chemistry.

| Sep 12, 2020

The film still follows the same formula of many young adult adaptations, albeit with its own handful of variables to try and change things up to varying success.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 8, 2020

I still feel a strong connection to the teenage girl who felt too much, who sometimes wasn't very attached to the idea of being alive, who experienced the hardships of first love, and this movie was made for that girl.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 5, 2020