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Critics Consensus: Elle Fanning gives a terrific performance in this powerful coming-of-age tale about a pair of teenage girls whose friendship is unnerved by the threat of nuclear war.
Critic Consensus: Elle Fanning gives a terrific performance in this powerful coming-of-age tale about a pair of teenage girls whose friendship is unnerved by the threat of nuclear war.
All Critics (111) | Top Critics (31) | Fresh (88) | Rotten (23)
Coming from anyone else, Ginger & Rosa would be a sensitive if predictable coming-of-age tale set in the mists of the distant past. But coming from writer-director Sally Potter, it's a major surprise.
Fanning is nearly perfect as Ginger navigates choppier waters than most teens have to. There is not a false note in her performance; no matter how melodramatic things become, everything about Ginger remains genuine.
Elle Fanning is scary. Scarily good.
In all respects, this is the completely captivating Fanning's picture.
Potter has a rich compositional eye, but she wisely trims the fat from the dialogue, which dances around most of the melodrama until an explosive last act.
What hurt, nuanced terror and exhilaration there is in Sally Potter's beautiful coming-of-age drama Ginger & Rosa.
Potter's film lacks enough heart, passion and sincerity to effectively resonate.
Director Sally Potter cares deeply about Ginger, an innocent about to lose it -- it's all over the way she captures her on camera.
The major events in the film are foreshadowed within the story, but the characters often do not do as you'd predict (or hope). The excellent character-driven narrative is propelled by skillful performances that envelope the audience.
She was aiming for a masterpiece, but instead Ms. Potter has made a slightly underdeveloped poem full of raging emotions it doesn't quite know what to do with.
With Ginger & Rosa, Potter once again documents the usually lonely road a woman takes in finding out who she really is, this time showing it from the perspective of someone who isn't even a woman yet.
You won't find many movies about teenage girls more perceptive than Ginger & Rosa by the English filmmaker Sally Potter.
Elle Fanning's performance and Sally Potter's beautiful direction and wonderful utilization of 1960s atmosphere allows Ginger & Rosa to become more than the sum of its parts. It's a coming of age story and a period piece all rolled in to one, but more importantly its a character study that miraculously transfers the protagonist's deeply emotional internal tension to the audience with incredible power.
Super Reviewer
As corny as this may sound, Ginger(Elle Fanning) and Rosa(Alice Englert) are well-nigh impossible to separate since before they were born when their respective mothers(Christina Hendricks & Jodhi May) met in a maternity ward in 1945. Together, they confront their nuclear fears in different ways. Ginger takes to protests and meetings while Rosa finds religion. While Rosa has never really known her father, Ginger has Roland(Alessandro Nivola) as her father, as he prefers to be known to her, when he is not sleeping elsewhere which includes his boat. As Roland puts it, he refused to enter the military during World War II, and was jailed for his beliefs, the worst part being in solitary, but is too self-righteous to wonder why people did not act differently than he did. Ever since her first feature, the classic "Orlando," Sally Potter's films have sadly been a prime case of diminishing returns. With her latest, the evocative, yet flawed "Ginger & Rosa" which moves to its own syncopated rhythm to match the jazz records on the soundtrack, she arrests that trend somewhat by thoughtfully exploring the connection between the personal and the political while not being the first person to conflate nuclear family and nuclear explosions. By having another red-headed protagonist who seeks to be a poet, Potter is saying there is nothing greater to fear than being alone at a time in 1962 when the world was facing nuclear annihilation, which concerned citizens responded with protests in England. Note to self: get a jazz band for the next protest.
It seems while Dakota Fanning was in the U.K filming the detestable "Now is Good", her much more talented little sister, Elle, was in the same country shooting Sally Potter's latest. It's a cliched 1960's coming of age tale which mixes the plots of "The Squid & the Whale" and this year's "Albatross" but lacks the charm of either. In recent years we've become used to seeing American movies starring Brits but here it's a reversal with most of the lead roles played by Americans. Robbie Ryan's cinematography and Fanning's performance are both commendable but otherwise there's little of interest on display.
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