Critics reviews

Decker entrusts her star, Elisabeth Moss, with a lot, and Moss (as she’s done a lot lately) delivers in breathtaking fashion. It’s a big performance, but it never swells past the movie’s scale.

Moss, brazen and witty and seeming to push herself to the very edge of control, is a galvanizing presence, convincingly wild even as she’s trapped in a hothouse of sometimes dubious ideas.

It’s a movie of scathing inward turbulence that, if it doesn’t quite match Decker’s other films in comprehensive originality, nonetheless expands the commercial cinema with new tones, moods, and styles of a sort that few other filmmakers have brought.

Decker's visual style is as distinct as a fingerprint. She destabilizes images, focusing in on parts of it, rarely looking at things head on.

There are no ordinary images in Shirley. Individually, none of these devices is original to Decker, but she’s united them with a fluidity and a sensual puckishness that’s all her own.

While I enjoyed some of the waspish dialogue, I found myself having a listlessly checked-out reaction I’ve never had to Decker’s previous work, which whatever its flaws always was restlessly finding its way towards to a new visual language—here, the results, though absolutely recognizable as in keeping with her previous work, don’t feel as startling.

Riveting in each and every scene, thanks not only to the excellent ensemble cast, but also, in large part, to its lush cinematography and mise en scène.