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

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

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

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

A sometimes incisive and sensitive portrait that is undercut by its awkward structure and a final veering toward melodrama.

Full Review | Apr 26, 2002

Everything about Girls Can't Swim, even its passages of sensitive observation, feels secondhand, familiar -- and not in a good way.

| Apr 25, 2002

Birot creates a drama with such a well-defined sense of place and age -- as in, 15 years old -- that the torments and angst become almost as operatic to us as they are to her characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 19, 2002

A coming-of-age movie that Hollywood wouldn't have the guts to make.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 19, 2002

Its vision of that awkward age when sex threatens to overwhelm everything else is acute enough to make everyone who has been there squirm with recognition.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 18, 2002

A sensitive and astute first feature by Anne-Sophie Birot.

| Apr 16, 2002

Yes they can swim, the title is merely Anne-Sophie Birot's off-handed way of saying girls find adolescence difficult to wade through.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 1, 2002