Frequently difficult to watch, White Girl is the powerful feature debut of a filmmaker with original vision and clear talent -- and a movie that proves a lead actress can possess the gift of transformative performance skills.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 30, 2016

Neatly plotted and minimally staged, the movie marks Wood as a talent to watch, but Saylor deserves equal credit for her layered performance as the title character, a confident young woman who crumbles into a confused and frightened child.

| Sep 29, 2016

First-time writer-director Elizabeth Wood's White Girl sets out to be a Great Gatsby for the 21st century - and perhaps in the process, to depict the orgastic future that Fitzgerald mentioned at the story's end.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 15, 2016

The film has a restless, kinetic style that suits the drug-fueled mayhem.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 15, 2016

Harrowing to the point of being off-putting - but not quite.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 15, 2016

"White Girl" announces the arrival of a director of considerable verve, and its choice of style and subject toes a similarly tricky line between leering exploitation and unflinching portraiture.

| Sep 8, 2016

"White Girl" vividly charts what is at times a violent culture clash. But it is the young lovers' desperate attempt to bridge the gap between their worlds that makes the film so deeply moving.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 8, 2016

White Girl is crusty with sweat, smudged eyeliner, cocaine, and cum.

| Sep 2, 2016

It's the story of a white girl, but also about how being a white girl shapes how the rest of the world sees her, and the ways it creates buffers that slow her descent as she makes one bad decision after another.

| Sep 2, 2016

Is there anything less shocking than a movie that thinks it's shocking? See White Girl if only for the all-stops-out performance of Morgan Saylor as a college student on the yellow brick road to cocaine and near-constant sexual debasement.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 2, 2016

Director Elizabeth Wood's style is immersive and raw, although to what end is not clear.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 2, 2016

A wild nightmare of girlhood in New York City, a compendium of the miseries and ecstasies of being female. Sex and the city never seemed so horrifying.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 1, 2016

We're all familiar with the term contact high, but not with its antithesis. Because it is so believable, "White Girl" is a contact bummer that's hard to shake.

| Sep 1, 2016

The film's endless scenes of debauchery and exploitation don't really yield much of a take-away ...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 1, 2016

Woods can't even bring herself to make Leah any worse than naive, if sometimes dangerously so, which makes White Girl less complex and sophisticated than an average episode of Girls.

| Sep 1, 2016

Easily finds its place among the cinematic canon of great dramas cut from the good-girl-gone-bad cloth.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 1, 2016

An arresting and well-told tale ...

| Sep 1, 2016

Its idea of drama is to have all of its characters make a bunch of haphazardly bad decisions as they stumble through New York steaminess.

| Original Score: C | Sep 1, 2016

A ferocious debut from writer-director Elizabeth Wood... a bold and brash cautionary tale filled with a lifetime's worth of terrible decisions.

| Aug 31, 2016

This is one of those films that merits a long cold shower afterwards. That might actually be a compliment - Wood wants to provoke.

| Aug 31, 2016