It’s a powerful, provocative, ambitious drama set in the shadow of September 11, 2001, a marvelously messy film about the messiness of emotions and people and relationships, especially as they are tested in extreme circumstances.

| Apr 26, 2025

This is frayed-edges filmmaking at its finest.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 28, 2024

[This] is probably the closest we’ll ever get to a William Gaddis adaptation, [...] [in which people] talk to each other and to Lisa [an astounding Anna Paquin], and Lisa talks to them, but nobody’s listening.

| Jul 7, 2022

This is a movie so dense and somewhat sloppy, somewhat wonderfully so, that I don't know I can do it any justice

| Jul 2, 2021

I highly recommend investing in the extended cut of this important drama. You'll be forced to wrestle with the meaning of justice...

| Mar 31, 2020

Anna Paquin offers one of the more indelible portraits of late adolescence put on screen.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 19, 2020

... captures the essence of New York City life (or the Upper West Side version of it, anyway) as well as any film ever has, while also portraying the difficult path to maturity of a 17-year old girl ...

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 30, 2019

Margaret has some intriguing ideas that don't often get dramatized in this fashion, and it has a fine cast bringing it to life. Still, like its young protagonist, sometimes it comes off as a bit too self-righteous and self-involved.

| Original Score: B | Feb 8, 2019

Let's hope [Director Kenneth] Longeran's next film doesn't take over a decade to appear -- and that he learns where his real talents lie.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 4, 2019

So contrived and ham-handed that its successes are mostly drowned in its failures.

| Aug 30, 2018

From its majestic slo-mo opening shots of New York City pedestrians to its devastating closing moments at the Met, "Margaret" enthralls like no other...This smart, literate urban opera is well deserving of a standing ovation.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 27, 2018

In Margaret, everyone has her own opera.

| Oct 2, 2017

"Margaret" not only faithfully captures a young woman's growing pains, it also serves as an emblem for our collective post-9/11 grieving process.

| Oct 7, 2015

This movie may be a lot of things, but finished isn't one of them.

Full Review | May 3, 2015

Knotty, ambitious and trading in messy human truths, it's the work of a master dramatist. Here's hoping Lonergan's next one reaches us a little faster.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 29, 2014

A messy-yet-poignant dramatic opera about the power of regret, loss, and worst of all, being a teenager.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 29, 2014

If two and a half hours in the company of quarrelsome, self-absorbed New Yorkers don't sound too punishing, there's much to like.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 29, 2014

It has failings, but they're not fundamental, and if anything they speak to just how much Lonergan tried to coerce into a single story. He was aiming for ecstatic transcendence.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 29, 2014

Lonergan's brainy script wouldn't work without Paquin, who makes Lisa a force of nature. As a walking paradox -- both controlling and completely out of control -- she's riveting.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 29, 2014

Margaret's journey to the screen may've been rocky, but the result is a singularly compelling study of trauma. It's a raw, messily magnificent near-masterpiece.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 29, 2014