Williams walks a fine line between total creep and smooth operator in a film that similarly explores the liminal space between fear and desire during female adolescence.

| Feb 13, 2024

The strained mother-daughter relationship in ''Smooth Talk'' is one of the film's highlights, suggesting that envy often translates into hostility.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 26, 2023

What makes Laura Dern’s performance the event that it is--one of the finest, most sustained and most shatteringly observed we’ve had this year... it’s rare to have this variety of insights about adolescence from an actress so nearly that age herself.

| Nov 26, 2023

Not just another youth movie, but a deft dramatization of a Joyce Carol Oates story adapted by a couple of documentary filmmakers in their feature debut.

| Nov 26, 2023

Dern plays a silly, hopeful, and doomed figure whose interest in a groovy figure (played by Treat Williams) shows its initial sparks and the charm anyone can put on before shifting gears to its more controlling ways.

| Mar 6, 2023

...an apt response to America's puritanical mindset that still refuses to responsibly address sex education.

| Original Score: FIVE STARS | Feb 28, 2022

Cultural landmarks of time past, cruising the shopping mall and checking out other teens without an iPhone, pinpoint the film to a specific time and place. But the themes of teenage ennui transcend time.

| Sep 14, 2021

That film, Laura Dern's first leading role, adapted Joyce Carol Oates' immortal short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" into an intense portrait of the choices young women are asked to make on a daily basis.

| Sep 10, 2021

Good work never truly vanishes, and 30-plus years later, 'Smooth Talk' finds its receptive era.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2021

A haunting drama.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 12, 2021

A tight, haunting tale of edgy play between innocent prey (a young Laura Dern, perfect in her ability to toggle between willing object of desire and innocent, awkward ingenue) and predator (Treat Williams, channeling James Dean and Martin Sheen)...

| Mar 5, 2021

Intimate, incisive and very specific American drama...

| Feb 27, 2021

Chopra has a precise eye for the vagaries of young adulthood, an Dern perfectly embodies the push-pull between Connie's curiosity and desire and the often-intimidating reality of adulthood.

| Nov 17, 2020

Remains one of the most insightful and harrowing examinations of American adolescence ever put on film.

| Nov 6, 2020

With its unlikely note of resolution, the coda in particular belies the adaptation's larger insistence on nuance, ambiguity, what even a young girl knows, without knowing, to be irresolvable.

| Nov 6, 2020

A gorgeous, thrilling portrayal of careless childhood dissolving in the summer sun, Smooth Talk is a landmark coming-of-age film and signals the arrival of one of cinema's favorite stars.

| Nov 5, 2020

Throughout, Joyce Chopra patiently and shrewdly observes the contradictions of human behavior that Laura Dern brilliantly conveys.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 1, 2020

Chopra's film is a fascinating time capsule.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 9, 2020

As Springsteen sang, 'the door's open but the ride, it ain't free.'

| Sep 21, 2020

The film's power is enormous throughout; spare means (long-held closeups, a four-minute take of sisterly confessions) evoke a drama that seems to have been filmed holding its breath.

| Sep 18, 2020