The Starling Girl’s thoughtfulness and lingering optimism toward a story that is predictably sorrowful is a necessary balance.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 17, 2023

“The Starling Girl” lives and breathes through Scanlen’s stellar performance.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 24, 2023

Laurel Parmet makes a striking, assured feature directorial debut with “The Starling Girl,” which serves double duty in solidifying Eliza Scanlen’s already pretty solid reputation as a young actor worth watching.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 19, 2023

Parmet is confident enough to know that atmosphere, emotional tone and unspoken feeling can convey far more meaning than the talkiest of dialogue.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 17, 2023

Parmet's less interested in cultish dread than a more naturalistic dullness of isolation and groupthink you'd find in any closed conservative society where women of faith have been sold a purity narrative.

| May 15, 2023

It’s a refreshing change to see this milieu treated with the level of nuance that Laurel Parmet brings to “The Starling Girl.”

| May 12, 2023

The saving graces of writer-director Laurel Parmet’s debut feature are the detailed portrayal of a community the movies generally caricature and Scanlen’s intuitive, impulsive Jem.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 12, 2023

A tender tale, “The Starling Girl” twirls through a spate of clichés... but sticks the landing thanks to Parmet’s rapt attention to the shifting desires of her central character.

| May 11, 2023

The film is an impressively complicated and compassionate drama about shame and desire.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 8, 2023

Scanlen shines, but everything around her is dull.

| Feb 2, 2023

The language and strictures of their religious community are perfectly rendered by writer and director Laurel Parmet, who captures the complicated interplay of power and immaturity that can blossom in isolated communities.

| Feb 2, 2023

An insightful portrait of coming of age Christian.

| Jan 25, 2023

Parmet shows dramatic confidence as she sets up a story that serves as a reminder of how dominant religion-based societies are in significant swaths of American life.

| Jan 23, 2023

Scanlen’s work here is steeped in the feeling of a real-life being lived right in front of you.

| Original Score: A | Jan 22, 2023

The power of this sensitive and devilishly detailed coming-of-age drama is rooted in the friction that it finds between biblical paternalism and modern personhood.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 22, 2023

Scanlen can portray miles of emotional growth with a few short minutes. Films of this tricky variety often hinge on the central performance, and in her hands, it mostly works.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 22, 2023

Parmet’s strong script and surety behind the camera navigates the audience through this complicated story of religion and sexuality, patriarchy and power, brought to eerily accurate life by the ensemble of excellent actors.

| Jan 21, 2023