The Perks of Being a Wallflower Reviews
Top CriticPerks seems like the work of a much more experienced director, maintaining fidelity to the source material without sacrificing any cinematic qualities, triggering genuine sentimentality and nostalgia through interaction between sound and image.
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| Original Score: 8/10
Regardless of the viewer's proximity to his or her own high school experience, "Perks" seems to get it right, precisely because it's not about a specific time or place.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Watson holds her own with a character more annoying on paper than in reality, but it's the boys who most impress ...
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| Original Score: 3/5
It's an earnest indie about a troubled teen, Charlie (Logan Lerman), and his various troubled confederates -- but it does demonstrate that Watson can stand on her own.
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| Original Score: B-
High school can be hell, but Stephen Chbosky's engaging new film argues that anyone can get by with a little help from their friends.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Somehow, these imperfections fit. Somehow, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" shouldn't be flawless.
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| Original Score: 4/4
This somewhat disjointed but refreshingly earnest movie ultimately establishes itself as a charmer.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
This is clearly a labor of love that was nurtured and sculpted from the beginning. The result is a film that feels exhilarating, fragile, funny and real.
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| Original Score: B+
Well-soaked in the familiar brine of teen sensitivity.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Here's how to make sure your novel arrives on screen with its soul intact: adapt and direct it yourself.
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| Original Score: 3/4
As a director, Chbosky mirrors his central character's emotional state.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" finds an unexpectedly moving freshness in the old clichés by remaining attentive to the nuances of what happens within and between unhappy teenagers.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Stephen Chbosky's script is insightful about the exhilaration of soul-piercing first love, and the misery of being swept into a relationship with someone who's forceful, determined and utterly wrong for you.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Verbal play and smartass-ery weaves through Wallflower, but it's of the predictable variety rather than the wryly observant commentary we'd hope for, like when a bored teen drawls: "That works on so many levels."
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| Original Score: 2/4
This big-screen adaptation, written and directed by Chbosky, doesn't advance the source material, though it preserves the book's sensitive tone and affectionate characterizations.
All of my previous selves still survive somewhere inside of me, and my previous adolescent would have loved "The Perks of Being a Wallflower."
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
There is an honesty to "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," a genuineness of experience that makes the movie soar when it just as easily could have stumbled.
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| Original Score: 4/5
It is the remarkable Logan Lerman who negotiates his journey to Charlie's self-discovery with so much dignity and vulnerability that he steals every scene and carries the picture.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
An occasionally funny, sometimes grim and all-in-all fairly adult look at privileged kids with sometimes awful lives, marred by abuse, drugs, depression, bullying and homophobia.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower'' is the sort of lower- budget personal film you hardly see being released by a major distributor anymore, except during awards season.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Likable, unsurprising and principally a showcase for the pretty young cast, notably Mr. Miller, who brings texture to his witty if sensitive gay quipster.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Thanks to [Chbosky's] stars, the film - like the book - is a smartly observed study of a troubled teen's first year in high school.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
While there are humorous and poignant moments, this angst-filled story of tender kisses, awkward dances, friends drifting apart, kindly English teachers, unrequited crushes and drug-addled partying has a nagging sense of deja vu.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's populated by characters who are just too good to be plausible.
Screenwriter/director Chbosky deserves credit for insisting on adapting a story he knows best, and he takes a heartfelt, if hardly visionary, approach.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Perks deserves points for going beyond the typical coming-of-age drivel aimed at teens. Logan Lerman excels as Charlie and Emma Watson makes a dream girl to die for, but the movie is stolen, head to tail, by Ezra Miller.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A graceful and beguiling drama adapted from Stephen Chbosky's 1999 novel ...
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| Original Score: A
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower," may not do anything groundbreaking, but it tells a familiar story in small, thoughtful ways.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Fact is, much as you and I might want to protest that we were cooler than these kids, wherever and whenever we did our growing up, we probably weren't.
It's sad, funny, warm, and nostalgic - kind of like high school, really.
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| Original Score: 3/4
You can feel Chbosky's blood, sweat and tears oozing out of this highly personal project, but that holy trinity of fluids isn't enough to wash away the sense that you've seen this before-many, many, many times.
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| Original Score: 2/5
I found the ultimate 'statement' of Wallflower to be a humane and encouraging one that the movie manages to deliver without getting overly precious.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
It's nostalgia with an emphasis on nostos, pain.
It's all frightfully familiar - as if teens sitting around the campfire need to be told the same story every night - until the last 15 mins., when this Cocoa Puffs movie reveals an underlayer of arsenic.
First-time writer-director Stephen Chbosky adapts his young-adult bestseller with far more passion than skill, which suits familiar scenes of adolescent awkwardness aptly enough.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower" captures the phenomenon of high school with all the tenderness and horror it deserves.
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| Original Score: A-
Heartfelt but rather generic.
Chbosky plays this CW serial stuff for maximum earnestness, stressing the teenage tendency to assume that every new thing they're feeling is unprecedented in human history, keeping the tone just-moist-eyed throughout.
