Calling Girlfriends a promising directorial debut only seems to damn it and its maker with faint praise. It is promising in the same sense that Francis Coppola's 1968 The Rain People and Steven Spielberg's 1974 Sugarland Express were promising.

| May 18, 2023

Girlfriends is a film whose parts are bigger than its whole, an imperfect film that succeeds almost in spite of itself.

| May 18, 2023

Girlfriends is a unique experience: a wry and unflinching presentation of contemporary women facing up to universal conflicts and, for better or worse, making their own decisions.

| May 18, 2023

Watching these two come to grips with the ghosts they've left in each other's lives is alternately exhilarating and devastating, but ultimately deeply satisfying.

| May 18, 2023

Melanie Mayron is the center of the movie, visible almost continuously, and her performance is extraordinarily fine and right. It is a reading of such spontaneity and naturalness as to conceal its superbly disciplined professionalism.

| May 17, 2023

The phenomenon is all too rare: a film that seems too short rather than too long, a film that makes you want more and leaves you feeling that you would like to see it all over again next week.

| May 17, 2023

Everyone in Girlfriends is so self-effacing that the movie never works up any convincing dramatic tension or provocative ideas. If that was Weill's original plan, she has gone to a lot of unnecessary trouble.

| May 17, 2023

It's the first starring role for Melanie Mayron and the very first movie for Anita Skinner. It may be that nobody got around to telling them they were portraying characters and not people. Let's hope nobody ever gets around to telling them.

| May 17, 2023

The film is mistitled. "Susan Weinblatt" is more accurate than "Girlfriends." The reason for the distortion probably is that actress Mayron is irresistible. When she is not on screen the picture dies.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 17, 2023

A fine little movie that makes you feel the love put into it.

| May 17, 2023

It's sort of a low-budget Turning Point, with perhaps a little more honesty.

| May 17, 2023

Claudia Weill handles all this sensitively in her directorial debut, but Girlfriends remains a low-key "little" picture with limited appeal.

| May 17, 2023

[An] intelligent and attractive, if occasionally sentimental, film.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 17, 2023

Weill, parlaying documentary film skills in this, her first dramatic feature, has sufficient rapport with her heroine to make Girlfriends heartfelt, if not artful.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 17, 2023

The film could have degenerated into soap opera, but the direction keeps it natural and realistic. This is a sad but appealing film, and it stars a wonderful actress named Melanie Mayron.

| May 17, 2023

The net effect is a warm (if not entirely cosy) liberal feminism.

| May 17, 2023

The intimate tale of young women’s effervescent socializing and melancholy uncertainty reflects public policy in a subplot involving the right to abortion.

| Aug 17, 2022

A little indie gem and lo-fi miracle whose emotional force catches you glancingly.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 23, 2021

The editing (by Suzanne Pettit) is so fleet-footed, and the scenes staged so economically by Weill and her cinematographer Fred Murphy, that it sometimes feels as though we're leafing through a pile of New Yorker cartoons.

| Jul 21, 2021

There is an almost overpowering sense of relief when watching Girlfriends that all stories matter: that the personal politics and insecurities so few of us live without are ... worthy of being projected on cinema screens.

| Aug 25, 2018