Eleven reviews, all of them favourable, and they agree on the essentials. Solondz’s film is read as a bleak, blunt and often funny account of the cruelty of junior high school, told without the sentiment critics expect from the coming-of-age genre. The praise gathers around Heather Matarazzo’s performance as Dawn Wiener, which most critics single out as unusually mature, and around Solondz’s refusal to make his heroine likeable while still keeping the audience on her side. Several note that the film’s tenderness towards its misfits outweighs any misanthropy.
The spread is narrow. Nobody dislikes it; the difference is between critics who find it accurate and entertaining and those who find it something more. The reservations concern the abrasive tone and the mercilessness of the detail. HeyUGuys goes furthest, calling it one of the better American coming-of-age films of the 1990s. The Guardian treats it as Solondz’s most accessible work, which from this director is a relative term.