Metacritic reviews

A sweet, deeply personal portrayal of female adolescence that's more attuned to the bonds between best girlfriends than casual flings with boys, writer-director Greta Gerwig’s beautiful Lady Bird flutters with the attractively loose rhythms of youth.

Lady Bird is often screamingly funny but it also has a generous spirit, embracing characters with all their flaws and foibles, virtues and defects.

Lady Bird is something truly special: a coming-of-age comedy so funny, perceptive, and truthful that it makes most other films about adolescence look like little more than lessons in cliché.

A lovingly observed, pitch perfect coming-of-age comedy, Gerwig's warm, astute account of the end of adolescence is a stunning solo debut.

Lady Bird is both snarky and sincere — a touching, markedly feminine ode to growing up that never takes its familiarity for granted. Gerwig earns the ability to make this rite-of-passage saga her own.

Lady Bird is one of the year’s great joys. Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo writer-director is so wise, so funny, and so remarkably assured that it seems to have flown in out of nowhere.

The film abounds with pinpoint insights into its mildly rebellious heroine's hunger to shed the restraints of home and Catholic school and bust into an independent life, and does so with a wealth of keenly observed detail.

The real surprise is just how honest and personal this film proves to be — again, par for the course with Gerwig, and yet, fairly rare among first-time directors, who haven’t had nearly so much practice simply being real.

Lady Bird doesn’t exist as a twee indie movie construct, it feels thrillingly real and deeply personal, every single beat ringing true.

There are two things that make this movie stand apart: Metcalf and Gerwig.