The talented cast ensures that each of them has the opportunity to have a genuine moment on screen. The problem is that director Theodore Melfi is more concerned with making the film's message clear.

| Dec 6, 2023

While ambitious, entertaining and touching, the story becomes repetitive and heavy-handed, and its transitions from humor to gravity are at times awkward.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 16, 2023

The Starling is perfectly fine. The cast is pretty good and the story is effective. It’s just a bit hard to appreciate in its totality when it makes something so hard to have for yourself seem so simple.

| Original Score: 6.5/10 | Jan 16, 2023

It doesn’t exactly make for a bad movie, but it can’t be called good either.

| Original Score: C- | Dec 19, 2022

The Starling is a manipulative cinematic therapy session equivalent to treating depression with a Flintstones vitamin. The wrong blend of comedy and drama.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 9, 2022

The Starling is a quasi-Hallmark story. It is an appropriation of soulfulness, not soulfulness itself.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 26, 2022

It's a familiar story with repetitive beats, told with little cinematic flair, which might've otherwise elevated the film. And worst of all, its stellar cast does little with the feather-light material.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Jul 11, 2022

What ultimately derails “The Starling,” other than a pretty insufferable easy listening soundtrack, is its “big moment” overkill.

| Mar 10, 2022

It’s nice to see McCarthy and O’Dowd in roles that showcase their emotional range; one just wishes it were in a project worthy of their talents.

| Original Score: C- | Feb 23, 2022

Melissa McCarthy sold it but those around her, including the writing, couldnt save it.

| Original Score: D | Feb 22, 2022

Works and reworks metaphors for the challenges of loss so much and with so little nuance it's like we're being divebombed with them, à la Tippi Hedren in The Birds.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 23, 2021

None of the emotions linger for days or hours or even minutes after. Instead it all feels gently indistinct. And for a film that's substantively about grief that feels like a betrayal more than anything.

| Dec 17, 2021

Written as if it were a collection of random ideas for characters, and directed at pace of a wellness seminar.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 1, 2021

It is not that Melissa McCarthy makes good movies, it is that she makes average movies.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Oct 18, 2021

The Starling is what would happen if you put a middle-aged Manic Pixie Dream Girl into a brown paper bag with Beaches and a pile of sh*t and stomped on it until your heel was bruised and the pavement below was smeared in unearned tears.

| Oct 12, 2021

The Starling has the seeds of a good movie. More than one, maybe. Unfortunately, the way in which this was executed simply doesn't pan out. Had a few things been different, this film might have soared, but here, its wings have been clipped.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 10, 2021

It would have been better if Timothy Olyphant's role could have been more developed and a more developed story would have also upped the complexity -- but I am ok with its simplicity.

| Oct 8, 2021

Besides offering top-notch entertainment, The Starling helps us understand the grieving process and how it works for different people.

| Oct 6, 2021

Good intentions are drowned by a story that badly wants to move you, but doesn't put in the work. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 5, 2021

One assumes that everyone involved intended 'The Starling' to be touching, but instead it is unbearably cloying, a maudlin misfire.

| Original Score: C- | Oct 3, 2021