The Girl Next Door
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Release Date: April 9, 2004 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
47
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 32 Critic Reviews
Positive:
13
Mixed:
11
Negative:
8
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
Film ThreatClint Morris
It's got everything the genre calls for – boppy music, cute boys, cute girls, lots of sexual lingo, and most importantly, laughs. Read full review
60
VarietyJoe Leydon
A tickle-and-tease teen sex comedy that plays like a late-night channel-surf through soft-core sitcoms, "American Pie" wannabes and '80s Brat Pack romances. Read full review
60
The A.V. ClubKeith Phipps
It sputters whenever it has to move the story along, and it too often forgets to pay attention to Cuthbert; it makes a point about the mistake of treating women as sex objects, but it's perfectly content to use her as a plot device for the second and third acts. Read full review
60
SlateDavid Edelstein
The film is seamlessly made, its mood balanced dreamily between sexy-funny and sexy-scary. Read full review
60
EmpireScott Russon
It has managed, admirably, to strike a balance between the wholesome 'school nerd blossoms' fairy tale and the gross-out comedy that is now a teen movie standard. Read full review
50
Village VoiceJessica Winter
Begins with the same deathless question that has bedeviled generations of teenagers: how to fill the space allotted to graduating seniors for memories and shout-outs at the back of their yearbook? Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorDavid Sterritt
Olyphant steals the show as a cheeky porn producer. The rest is gimmicky and predictable, except for a clever surprise near the end. Read full review
50
TV Guide MagazineEthan Alter
The film has a certain easygoing charm, choppiness notwithstanding, and delivers several big laughs; if leads Cuthbert and Hirsch were as charismatic as scene-stealing supporting players Olyphant and Marquette, it might have joined the ranks of memorable teen comedies. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleKimberley Jones
Until Hollywood stops being a boys club, and America graduates beyond short pants and its embarrassingly pubescent attitudes toward sex, I suppose one can only hope that all male adolescent fantasies will play as goofily sweet as this one. Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
What is disturbing and frankly distasteful about The Girl Next Door is how slick and shameless it is in its eagerness to blur boundaries, to squeeze as much transgressive material as it can into a nominally bland and innocent form, to serve up a benign, sanitized and exquisitely titillating portrait of the world of pornography in the cozy sheep's clothing of a teenage movie. Read full review
40
SalonCharles Taylor
Lost the friskiness and wildness and charm the movie might have had. Read full review
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