Avis Metacritic

The movie maintains interest throughout and it’s ultimately satisfying, though with one qualification: The last minutes treat the story as though its whole purpose was to illustrate a social and political issue. It’s actually, for 98% of its running time, the story of a person — and it’s better that way.

The film . . . is good, not great; it never quite marries the skewering of New York elites with the true-crime feel of its grittier elements. But the performances keep it mostly on track.

There’s a worthwhile story in here about the long-term effects of trauma, how society disregards and casts aside adolescent girls, how quick we are to blame the victim, how bullying can lead to terror—but all these messages gets lost in translation.

Kunis’s alpha female appears at once ferocious and like a conspicuous sham. (Imagine Sheryl Sandberg as a “Scooby-Doo” villain.) Her performance carries the film — a fortunate break for the director Mike Barker, who has the near-impossible challenge of shepherding the tone from snark to painful sincerity.

The unquestionably well-intentioned and obviously deeply personal Luckiest Girl Alive would benefit from more mature guidance.

Small edits could have propelled the film into a dark drama instead of something resembling a PSA.

Luckiest Girl Alive falls short of its promise, a reminder that, however ironic the title is intended to be, fortune tends to favor the bold.

Luckiest Girl Alive struggles to balance its dual aspirations: delivering an emotionally wrought tale about survival and wrapping its gravity in the cheeky breeziness of publishing comedies like Freeform’s The Bold Type.

There are pieces of Luckiest Girl Alive that seem interested in a life splintered by trauma, in the relief of unburdening, the hunger for certainty over what happened, the thrill of playing on cultural expectations for women. But the story it ultimately tells is an empty, self-serving fantasy.

The whole thing is mostly made up of tasteless decisions.