The film has enough empathy to go round – for a mother overwhelmed by a child’s bottomless need, and a child’s agony over the changing rules of their bond.

| Feb 10, 2025

This offbeat film is slow and introspective, but it beautifully captures a deep dive into human dynamics and the very real pains of growing up.

| Feb 4, 2025

There are almost no emotional highs and lows in this movie. The camera seldom moves, and there are a lot of static camera shots of scenes where nothing much is happening. It isn't exactly a boring movie, but it feels emotionally muffled.

| Original Score: C | Jan 25, 2025

Janet Planet is for the weirdos who found more solace in art than they did with other people when they were young. For the adventures taken and missed, all in the name of growing up.

| Jan 23, 2025

Baker handles everything with great tenderness, affection and attention to detail in which each phase gains unexpected dimensions and meanings. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jan 14, 2025

Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, is impressive in this debut. The movie doesn’t feel like “filmed theater” — it’s patient, quiet, observant cinema.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 29, 2024

Coming-of-age drama focusing on a sad 11-year-old girl coping with her relationship with her mother.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 26, 2024

The playwright Annie Baker shows a deft cinematic touch in her largely autobiographical directing debut.

| Dec 20, 2024

A tender yet subversive memory play set in western Massachusetts during the summer of 1991, about a dour little girl.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 1, 2024

Baker gets the haziness and dream-like pre-adolescence right. With a blink of an eye, it will be gone. But for this brief time, mom and daughter relationship is precious, like a planet and its moon.

| Oct 10, 2024

[Annie Baker] is an expert in transmitting lots of emotion with very little action, and Janet Planet is no different, using micro-gestures and passing expressions to tell her story.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 17, 2024

Janet has bad taste in boyfriends, but Baker has excellent taste in character actors.

| Sep 16, 2024

Great acting is overshadowed by a tediously slow, thin story in this reflective drama that's not for the impatient.

| Sep 3, 2024

Janet Planet is a rare gem, so earnest in its approach that it resonates with a poignant, almost painful, honesty.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 29, 2024

Nostalgic but never naff, Janet Planet fills the screen with warmth and compassion for its charming, flawed and very human characters.

| Aug 26, 2024

... The film falls victim to the mimetic fallacy as Baker makes us privy to the tedium of Janet and Lacy’s lives without unlocking anything particularly interesting or profound about either of them.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 9, 2024

Janet Planet plays a little like a memory piece from an unknown future – the assembled past life of an adult who, as a child, grasped only a bare majority of the tensions unfolding about her. A lovely, flawed idyll.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 8, 2024

moves casually to a conclusion that most watching will find some truth in.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 8, 2024

Annie Baker finds a moving balance of head and heart in her directorial debut that portends a brilliant cinematic career to come.

| Aug 6, 2024

The movie is readymade for people who read The New Yorker. It is bougie and in love with its own insularity and yet it’s somehow impressive, poignant and faintly irritating.

| Aug 2, 2024