Critics reviews

In tone, Booksmart is both bawdy and sentimental, fusing the spectacular with the intimate.

Teen movies needn’t be all doom and gloom (and Molly isn’t as fortunate as her friend) but as much as Booksmart plays with genre tropes, it still seems nervously bound by them.

A stellar high school comedy with an A+ cast, a brilliant script loaded with witty dialogue, eye-catching cinematography, swift editing, and a danceable soundtrack.

It feels like an innovation, an R-rated teen comedy that proves that you can center girls’ experiences without sacrificing grossness, and that you can be gross without being too mean.

The rapid-fire, note-perfect dialogue is punctuated with moments of brilliant conceptual whimsy: animated and underwater sequences; horror-movie jump scares; immersive theater.

Rubber-faced and razor-sharp in her timing, Feldstein is a delight to watch, even in a film as wearisome as Booksmart. But her presence also, however indirectly, further highlights the movie’s shortcomings.

Despite the emotional authenticity of the protagonists’ dilemma, their journey comes off as a fantasy. Its perspective is as Manichaean as one might expect to find in a doctrinaire religious or political film.