It seems hell-bent on leading its audience by the hand, as if anxious that we can’t make out what it’s trying to do.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 14, 2024

Unfortunately, the film relies on a number of outdated stereotypes of queer women. Making Jean’s character lonely, fearful, and miserable perpetuates the idea that a queer person’s identity and worth are tied to being in a romantic relationship.

| Jul 25, 2023

Leaning on worn-out art house cinema tropes (most notably the one about LGBTQ+ characters being denied happiness), Tell It To The Bees wastes its potential.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 21, 2022

The final half hour could (and should) have been the entire film, but if you fancy watching this hardened pair stare ambiguously at each other across a beehive for 70 minutes first, you'll love this film. Otherwise, skip to the good bit.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 1, 2021

Even if it doesn't make much buzz, it still never stings.

| Sep 30, 2020

Though at times director Annabel Jankel... can be obvious in driving home the points she wants to make, her romantic period drama is a touching exploration of repressed desire and intolerance.

| May 29, 2020

The costuming and production design are impressive and the New Zealand-raised Paquin (The Piano) delivers a suitably understated performance of quiet devastation.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 8, 2020

Totally has the look and feel like something you would see on the BBC. Slow in pacing, solid acting with an engaging story. A small, well made film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 2, 2020

Tell It To The Bees is buzzing with desire and dances to the tune of humming bees

| Nov 20, 2019

At first glance, Annabel Jankel's film... could be written off as any other period romance, but the two leads, Holliday Grainger and Anna Paquin share chemistry and understanding that the film becomes a precious moment in time.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 23, 2019

It's kind of adorable, though, even when it's... qualitatively questionable.

| Original Score: C | Aug 8, 2019

It's an unsatisfactory film, a strange mixture of pedestrian scene-setting, an uncertain tone and an overarching and overused metaphor of the bees, which at one point takes off into magic realism.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 2, 2019

There's nothing all that interesting to it, or anything that distinguishes it from other queer romance dramas.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 31, 2019

Tell it to the Bees is ultimately a love story, and Grainger and Paquin make it a good one.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 24, 2019

Watery romance that has no real feeling to cling to.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 24, 2019

Tell it to the Bees... is a period drama with no sting. There's no urgency to its message, no passion at its centre.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 23, 2019

Directed by Annabel Jankel, it's a frustrating film, but nice performances from Grainger and Paquin, and structural echoes of The Go-Between, slowly win you over, only to let you down as the film descends into a strange mix of melodrama and apian fantasy.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 22, 2019

Yikes. That wasn't pretty.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 22, 2019

The uneven tone leaves the film intriguing and thoughtful, but it's never as powerfully moving as it needs to be.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 22, 2019

Tell It to the Bees is a solid movie - at least until it mobilises a swarm of the eponymous insects as a deus ex machina. However, the screenplay by Henrietta Ashworth and Jessica Ashworth doesn't offer a clear enough sense of who the protagonist is.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 22, 2019