Metacritic reviews

Molly Shannon is brilliant and warm as the literary icon.

If the film has a flaw, its that it’s so preoccupied with balancing its furious feminism with gags about Victorian life that there’s little running time to lavish on Dickinson’s actual poetry.

This is a great example of Olnek's style. It's respectful, but it's also alive. It's serious, but it's also tongue-in-cheek. Olnek's approach gives Emily room to breathe. At last.

Wild Nights with Emily feels at once revelatory and a total delight, a surprise for both for literature geeks and those who didn’t do their required reading in school.

This is an irreverent film, but its lightness is meaningful. With each silly flourish, Olnek offers joy and companionship to a figure whose history was more conveniently presented to generations of readers as solitary.

The film’s playful tone is a corrective to a century of scholarship that insisted on projecting the image of a moody spinster onto Emily Dickinson.

Beneath the japery and rough-edged filmmaking is an abiding love for the work — its passion and resilience — and respect for the women whose hidden lifelong language that work may have been.

It’s a quick, funny movie.

However well or poorly it matches the truth of Emily's life, the film's vision of her long relationship with Susan is warmly funny.

Despite the juicy details and fascinating topic, it’s disappointing that the stilted tone makes it so difficult to connect emotionally with this important story.