Damsel’s twists on common fairytale tropes are nothing new, but the film is elevated by Millie Bobby Brown’s performance and a basic yet solid script.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 6, 2025

Netflix’s Damsel is an adventure that feels about as exciting as watching paint dry on a medieval castle wall. This film is a perfect example of a story that promises much but delivers little.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Dec 19, 2024

All in all, Damsel is too corny to really connect with viewers who have seen other movies explore similar ideas but with more nuance or at least woven into more exciting tales.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 7, 2024

A handsomely produced mini-epic, with a good idea and a great cast, that is neither here nor there in execution.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 3, 2024

The role of Elodie is perfectly tailored for Brown, who evolves seamlessly from prim and proper princess to resourceful action heroine.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 9, 2024

Damsel features an excellent lead performance from Millie Bobby Brown and a few entertaining sequences in the third act, but it is unable to overcome bland and familiar execution.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Apr 12, 2024

The second half of Damsel grows repetitive, but Brown is a physically and dramatically compelling presence—and the dragon, menacingly voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, is frightening enough to make Smaug’s scales tingle.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 10, 2024

While the film’s title and setup toy with the trope of the damsel in distress, Brown is so self-assured, there’s never any sense that Elodie is in real peril, which saps the film of significant tension.

| Apr 1, 2024

No biggie, but a decent enough way to pass a couple of hours.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 28, 2024

Damsel is a good movie from Netflix that is just the right running time and looks every bit as good as any big-screen production out there.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 28, 2024

It is a strangely lifeless pastiche of folktales with minor adjustments, none of which serve to truly put the viewer under a spell.

| Mar 27, 2024

What unfurls is a mostly appealing, occasionally pulse-raising, if not entirely original or engrossing, mix of Joe Versus the Volcano, The Descent, The Goonies, Game of Thrones and Dragonheart.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 22, 2024

In its large set pieces and leaps into adventure over tension, the film spirals away from a movie that the Brothers Grimm would be proud of and instead into YA cinema, predictable ending and all.

| Mar 20, 2024

Damsel is the action film for these less-constrained gender times. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 20, 2024

With Damsel, they’ve hit the bullseye of this low-hanging target—a movie fine enough that most people you know will likely at least half-watch it, and bland enough that most of us will have forgotten about it entirely in a month’s time.

| Mar 20, 2024

What I liked most about Dan Mazeau's screenplay is its interplay between its two leads, Brown's Elodie and the dragon, voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 19, 2024

... The plot ticks along as one expects but separates itself from predictability with forty minutes of survival horror in the caves that's reminiscent of 'The Descent' and other claustrophobic adventures with similar monsters. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 19, 2024

For the most part it sticks to flipping the script on ye olde Damsel In Distress cliché, and makes it work.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 19, 2024

Don’t go in expecting Game of Thrones crossed with Kill Bill. This film is more like a knock-off The Hunger Games, featuring a talking dragon

| Mar 18, 2024

To say that Damzel moves in fits and starts may be too kind.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 18, 2024