Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 16, 2005

| Original Score: 75/100 | May 13, 2005

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 15, 2003

An overly melodramatic but somewhat insightful French coming-of-age film ...

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 31, 2003

The film's intimate camera work and searing performances pull us deep into the girls' confusion and pain as they struggle tragically to comprehend the chasm of knowledge that's opened between them.

| Sep 30, 2002

The heedless impetuousness of youth is on full, irritating display in [this] meandering and pointless French coming-of-age import from writer-director Anne-Sophie Birot.

| Original Score: D | Aug 27, 2002

...a well-observed and disturbing little movie

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Aug 23, 2002

Birot has succeeded in making a movie that has some laughs, low points and high ideals.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 20, 2002

Until its final minutes this is a perceptive study of two families in crisis -- and of two girls whose friendship is severely tested by bad luck and their own immaturity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2002

The story ultimately takes hold and grips hard.

| Original Score: B | Aug 15, 2002

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 10, 2002

I felt sad for Lise not so much because of what happens as because she was captured by this movie when she obviously belongs in something lighter and sunnier, by Rohmer, for example.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 9, 2002

Despite its shortcomings, Girls Can't Swim represents an engaging and intimate first feature by a talented director to watch, and it's a worthy entry in the French coming-of-age genre.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 8, 2002

For a long time the film succeeds with its dark, delicate treatment of these characters and its unerring respect for them.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 2, 2002

Compelling, beautifully photographed French import.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 1, 2002

A typically observant, carefully nuanced and intimate French coming-of-age film that is an encouraging debut feature but has a needlessly downbeat ending that is too heavy for all that has preceded it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 19, 2002

While not all transitions to adulthood are so fraught, there's much truth and no small amount of poetry in Girls Can't Swim.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 14, 2002

Evokes the frustration, the awkwardness and the euphoria of growing up, without relying on the usual tropes.

| Original Score: A- | Jun 6, 2002

What sets Ms. Birot's film apart from others in the genre is a greater attention to the parents -- and particularly the fateful fathers -- in the emotional evolution of the two bewitched adolescents.

| May 17, 2002

Feels less like it's about teenagers, than it was written by teenagers.

| May 10, 2002