This is a movie that lets us understand the foibles and dark underpinnings of a movement that seems to have transcended removing itself from “this world’s” everyday concerns to embracing the ugliest elements of its dogma — superstition, dogmatic intolerance, “control” and a disregard for any American or American institution that doesn’t fit their myopic worldview.

Roger Moore

Movie Nation

The Starling Girl doesn’t always hold our attention, mainly due to an occasionally shaggy pace that forgets we’re often ahead of the plot. There are also two endings: one built on a choice of Jem’s that’s incredibly stirring and naturally tense, but then a subsequent scene with music and dance that reads more like something scripted to be a meaningful bookend.

Robert Abele

Los Angeles Times

One of the smartest things about Parmet’s film is the way it portrays internalized misogyny in her female characters. The Starling Girl is a complex, often disturbing portrait of the way women have been pressured to shrink themselves and pass on that shame to their daughters.

Jourdain Searles

The Hollywood Reporter