Writer/director Annie Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, makes her feature filmmaking debut from the unique perspective of a lonely little girl jostling for her mother’s attention when that mother attracts lovers like bees to honey

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jun 17, 2024

Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler play a mother and her eleven-year-old daughter in a story that quietly sidesteps coming-of-age drama conventions.

Full Review | Jun 15, 2024

Ultimately too impressionistic, rambling, and unfocused to leave much of an impression.

Full Review | Original Score: C | May 11, 2024

Pulitzer-winning stage dramatist Annie Baker paints childhood as a midsummer daydream full of tragicomic adult behaviour in her droll, charming film debut.

Full Review | Mar 10, 2024

Much as the title suggests, it is like we are being drawn into the orbit of something immense. Conversely, and this is crucial to its understated beauty, it is also something small. In wondrous detail, it shows how one person can become an entire world.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Mar 4, 2024

Baker’s tingling delicacy of touch makes it a subtly distinctive experience: it’s a film I already looked forward to revisiting while tiptoeing through it the first time.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 28, 2024

It makes some keen observations on the travails of childhood and of a single mom raising a needy child.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Nov 17, 2023

Annie Baker nimbly evokes the specificities of setting—early 90s Western Mass, awash in gentle hippiedom with transcendentalist puppeteers and earnest contra dances—but stumbles to coax out the intricate particulars of her vision onto the screen.

Full Review | Oct 19, 2023

There isn’t much plot here but newcomer Zoe Ziegler is charming as the little girl and her relationship with her mother Janet played by Julianne Nicholson feels authentic and real

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 17, 2023

While Baker’s visual command is very assured for a first-time filmmaker, and her dialogue retains the minimalistic, slice-of-life beauty that made her plays stand out, the larger picture seems to have gotten away from her a bit.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Oct 12, 2023

Like a snapshot of a time of innocence, Janet Planet makes you ponder those complex scenarios you couldn’t understand when you were a kid.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 11, 2023

This is not just one of the great films of its year, but one of the finest first films in the annals of the medium.

Full Review | Oct 10, 2023

This is a film that washes over you in a wave of quiet subtleties, marking a profoundly striking debut.

Full Review | Oct 9, 2023

Baker casts a warm, humid spell with her keen eye and ear––she uses up the entire width of the frame with compositions that provoke mystery, and builds an organic soundscape of bird calls and cricket chirps that lull you into Lacy’s world.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Oct 9, 2023

The many great scenes in Janet Planet underscore the frustrations of its few bad ones: Even an emotionally tumultuous childhood can be a lot more absorbing than the indulgences of the adult world.

Full Review | Original Score: 7.7/10 | Oct 9, 2023

Janet Planet is a welcome rebuttal to the dominant modes of popular art – the trauma plot, or our overemphasis on narrative – if not always the most compelling to actually watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 9, 2023

Operates in a single, precious sub-Kelly Reichardt register, its every second marked by studied images, sounds and performances.

Full Review | Oct 8, 2023

Annie Baker’s spare dialogue style remains intact, with each line revealing of character and mood.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 8, 2023

Both disarming and odd, a film both lovely for its observational aptitude and at times mildly annoying in its smarty-pants conversational cleverness. Whatever else you can say, it’s an absolute original.

Full Review | Oct 2, 2023

The kind of luminous portrait of a summer where nothing happens and yet everything happens.

Full Review | Sep 29, 2023