Metacritic reviews

Key to the film’s appeal is the way that the friendship between the four girls, Dina, Lola, Daisy (Lisa Barnett), and Mari (Eden Grace Redfield), is persuasively brought to life.

While James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, The End of the Tour) authors a slightly uneven depiction of childhood, Summering still captures the gentle doom of being aware that your life is about change forever.

Summering works better as a mood than it does a movie, succeeding in channeling a certain feeling of transition despite ambling, or occasionally stumbling though more traditional kids-flicks narrative beats.

All in all, Summering is a very nice movie – sweet, affectionate, nostalgic, harmless – so it’s tempting to give it a pass. But “nice” and “compelling,” sadly, are not the same thing.

Nostalgia may be the strongest emotion engendered by this breeze-blown dandelion seed of a film, which nods to the bittersweet complexities of growing up and confronting adulthood, but never gets as far as fully dramatizing them.

Summering may be a breezy little trip through the nostalgia of youth, but its stabs at deeper meaning are woefully immature.

Had [Ponsoldt] truly trusted his young performers and crafted the script accordingly, Summering could have been something special. Instead he’s made a film as unfocused and forgettable as a rainy late-summer afternoon. These characters deserve better.

A misfire that’s as stilted as it is inert.

Its potential for magic is dulled by uneven performances, unconvincing chemistry and an uninspiring script. Summering ends up a movie that’s easier to appreciate for what it’s trying to do than love for what it’s actually doing.

So yes, there’s the whiff of Stephen King’s story “The Body” to this, with emotional BFF bonding and the like. But barely a note of this contrived, Nutrasweetened melodrama engages, even on those rare instances in which something rings true.