Avis des critiques

Occasionally, the movie overplays its bid for modern relevance... and the soundtrack’s twee covers of girl power anthems are a warble too far... But Dunham prevails in convincing audiences that coming-of-age in a so-called simpler time was equally tumultuous...

Dunham’s film has the kind of winning light touch that’s impossible to fluke... Tonally, it’s somewhere in the mud-caked vicinity of the classic Children’s BBC series Maid Marian and her Merry Men, with the raunch and candour cranked up very slightly, though never beyond early-teen levels.

It’s fun, and endearing, and the patriarchy gets a good kicking... But it feels like one joke or sketch that’s been dragged out for nearly two hours. It’s fine, yet forgettably so.

Her [Dunham's] adaptation, which she wrote and directed, manages to encompass all of that youthful naivete and hard-earned wisdom in a smart, entertaining package that is both modern and nostalgic

Catherine Called Birdy is indeed Dunham’s story, as much as anything she has made, a successful reversion. It may be overtly a YA movie – but then what else was Girls ever but young adult?

Unlike Sharp Stick, her contemporary "adult" drama about an adolescent woman-child's sexual awakening released earlier this year, the Girls auteur and early-aughts lighting rod finds a sweet spot far from the self-regarding navel of her Brooklyn-millennial gaze.

[A] charming, clever, and altogether delicious comeback film that redefines Dunham in a way that just recently seemed unlikely.

For a film that begins with its mischievous main character participating in a ribald mud fight, Catherine Called Birdy feels oddly lifeless.

In Dunham’s hands, the throughline of enduring and discovering one’s worth, however historically imagined, is at once a comfort and a lark.

Dunham has made a really attractive and cohesive film, merging her modern, punky sensibilities with the dirt-and-stone drear of the time period.

And while of course a very different work, Dunham’s previous film this year—the largely divisive but highly audacious Sharp Stick—showed there was still a lot of fire in her belly, which can’t help make this seem like even more of a disappointing effort.

But this incredibly loose adaptation leans a little too heavily into Dunham’s economically oblivious feminism, stripping the novel of much of its thematic heft, resulting in crowd-pleasing, bawdy comedy that’s more heart than it is head.