| Focus Features | Release Date: June 19, 2026 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
13
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
AwardsWatchJun 25, 2026
Where Girls Like Girls stumbles is in its loftier emotional goals. It can’t reach the true heart-wrenching drama it seeks to extract from Coley’s familial tragedy nor her pain with the middle chapter of this relationship. Yet, there’s a real sweetness to the movie that acts as a summer balm.
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The romantic relationship in Girls Like Girls flounders the instant it gets going, however, because Sonya’s hot-and--cold (mostly cold) attitude toward Coley is so confusing and poorly articulated. It seems obvious enough that the invisible enemy here is a hetero disapproval that Sonya can’t quite get past, but Kiyoko doesn’t do enough to identify those pressure points, other than shots of Sonya trying to appease her temperamental boyfriend.
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Jun 20, 2026
Mostly, Girls Like Girls wins us over with a singular type of first-film assuredness: a familiar story presented as the most personal reveal ever. If you can’t remember what it was like to try to tiptoe while swooning, your heart barely able to stay in your chest, you were never a teenager.
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Screen RantJun 19, 2026
Girls Like Girls is a familiar plot, which is part of the point. It's a grounded love story that isn't afraid to make characters messy or deal with trickier subjects, largely executing a painfully realistic story with a good sense of craft. While some elements feel underbaked or seem one-note, the central focus and performances by Myra Molloy and Maya Da Costa give Girls Like Girls an effective emotional core.
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The GuardianJun 18, 2026
Nothing in Girls Like Girls exists beyond individual feeling, and there are no larger institutions to speak of, not even a school. It all leaves the film stranded in an unsatisfying place: intensely personal yet emotionally unearned, politically gestural yet totally vacant of politics. Kiyoko has made a film obsessed with being seen. It never once learns how to look.
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Jun 17, 2026
While there’s something admirable about Girls Like Girls and its refusal to tidy up the mess of queer adolescence (the film will no doubt be an instant classic for young sapphics), it unfortunately never deepens into something fully realized. It only gestures toward the feeling and atmosphere of emotional complexity, rather than materializing its substance in full.
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Jun 17, 2026
Jun 17, 2026
Kiyoko keeps a light touch, opting to let the characters’ actions speak for themselves. There’s no preaching here, and I was surprised at how well Coley was written. She’s willing and able to stand up for herself, but she is still a vulnerable teen, full of hormones and emotions, and able to be deeply hurt by the callousness of others.
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IndieWireJun 17, 2026
For Girls Like Girls the movie, the final result is less a standalone work of great cinema announcing Kiyoko as a feature director, and more an act of dreamy devotion designed to comfort her core fanbase. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it does change who, and perhaps what, this soulful and peculiar film adaptation is for.
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