The Unbearable Fakeness of Film Reviews

In January 2020, Promising Young Woman premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to mixed reviews. The movie had the right message (“a female revenge fantasy”) but it was a sloppy mess (“not always surefooted in its style or substance”). “Mulligan, a fine actress, seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale,” wrote Dennis Harvey in Variety. “[She] wears her pickup-bait gear like bad drag; even her long blonde hair seems a put-on.”