| Utopia | Release Date: July 29, 2022 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
10
Mixed:
16
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews
The PlaylistJan 23, 2022
Dunham has not lost her habit of exploring taboo and shocking scenarios. But just like this new film’s fluid, low key visual style and bright, poppy production design, the coming-of-age story it presents feels so organically conceived that what would surely be completely unacceptable in another context appears to obey the film’s own perverse set of rules with warmth and a refreshing lack of judgment.
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Feb 3, 2022
Sharp Stick is deeply personal; a series of constellation-like animations that arise in Sarah Jo’s mind as she has sex serve as a reminder of those resonances. Like any artist worth her salt, Dunham yields to the farthest corners of her imagination and experience—backlash be damned.
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Jan 25, 2022
The script is nowhere near as tight and the characters nowhere near as well-rounded as in Dunham’s previous efforts, yet this unpolished quality is what allows the film to exist in a realm of messiness that feels alluringly unfamiliar. In fact, the ideological murkiness of Sharp Stick is one of the most rewarding things about it.
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RogerEbert.comJul 29, 2022
Dunham unearths a refreshing amount of humor, honesty, and sincerity through Sarah Jo’s misadventures with Josh between bedsheets, at once challenging her complex (though not entirely unwarranted) reputation of being a tone-deaf and privileged one-trick pony, with her second-only feature.
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Jan 23, 2022
None of it adds up to a coherent thesis on love or sex, but it doesn’t really need to. And there’s something thrilling about Dunham’s refusal to give her film a clear social intent. Much like Sarah Jo’s sexual dalliances, Sharp Stick is ultimately about the excitement of exploration.
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Aug 15, 2022
Aug 30, 2022
At its best points, Sharp Stick functions like a cinematic mixtape of every Taylor Swift song, presenting romantic clichés and immediately pulverizing them into dust. At its worst points, Sharp Stick is a twee, porn-ified Napoleon Dynamite, humiliating the very heroine who we should empathize with the most.
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Aug 1, 2022
The film itself feels as if it has emerged fully formed from the mind of its author, for better and for worse. It is a study of women’s sexuality, desire and autonomy that succeeds just as much as it stumbles, a method of feminist storytelling that privileges the pursuit of desire over an evenness of narrative. It cares not for the customary, but instead for the messiness of real life, which here is inextricable from its own means.
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Jan 23, 2022
It has the air of a television-show fragment, and not just because its initial entanglement feels like the stuff of a pilot, something that has to be gotten out of the way to reach the actual premise. It’s also because it introduces characters who feel like they have storylines in the wings.
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The Film StageFeb 3, 2022
Sharp Stick is nothing short of singular. If it’s unlikely this project will gain the director any new fans, it represents another step into bold territory—even as quality dips and swerves, this is a project where it seems no notes were given, the kind of freedom that’s refreshing in today’s landscape.
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Aug 4, 2022
Sharp Stick is a rather sour and troublesome film—a strange hybrid that sometimes plays like a Fractured Fairy Tale and is populated by razor-thin characters who behave in an inconsistent manner and exist in a world that alternates between gritty reality and some kind of bizarro alternative world where things just don’t add up.
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Jul 28, 2022
Jan 23, 2022
Sharp Stick, in its quick verbal exchanges, its naked sexuality, its general air of busting taboos as if they were oversize balloons, is recognizably a Lena Dunham movie. But it’s the first one of her projects in which the parts don’t quite add up, because it seems as if what we’re watching hasn’t been so much created as contrived.
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The GuardianJan 24, 2022
This awkward, misjudged, occasionally sexy film has seeds of a radical, fresh story and flashes of directorial brilliance but is hobbled throughout by the confounding decision to write her 26-year-old main character as either insensitively neuro-divergent or more sheltered child than adult.
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Movie NationAug 2, 2022
It’s kind of slapdash and all over the place — again, like “Girls” — introducing interesting characters and losing track of them, focusing on the most sexually promiscuous/adventurous young woman in the lot. It doesn’t really hold together or earn its “My point, and I do have one” scene.
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