Girls Town

At its best, Girls Town has a scalding vigor and spontaneity, a real sense of the streets. At its worst -- which is far too often -- it's just as shallow, violent and cliché-ridden as the big-budget movies whose excesses its makers want to correct.

Girls Town walks the walk, talks to the talk -- and fights the good fight.

Although Girls Town has moments that border on the moral didacticism of an afterschool special, these too are leavened by the actresses' honest, hard-hitting portrayals.

Girls Town is an actor's picture, which is its most important achievement and also explains its own weakness, which is lack of a compelling story, but it takes a shrewd, hard-working director to make this sort of experiment in realism look so easy.

The viewer has no better sense of where life will take them after the closing credits roll. If the point is that life has ragged edges, however, the movie itself is admirably compact.

Jim McKay's well-intentioned low-budget picture could've benefited from a little of that ol' MGM spit and polish. The film, which is semi-improvised, means to be spontaneous and passionate, but the result is often unfocused and monotonous.

Girls Town is more timeless than timely. It’s dressed in painfully ‘90s garb, but the themes it explores and the language it speaks resonate louder now than they did on its original release in 1996.

McKay's film does more than just sensationalize this subject -- it explores it with intensity, authenticity, and intelligence, leaving the questions it probes and raised unresolved and challenging.

[Girls Town] resorts to clichés but makes the clichés workable and believable. Taylor, in particular, is magnificent.

A story more or less made up by the actors as they went along. This adds vivid spontaneity, but it makes the strongest actor stand out more than she should, and it makes the movie disjointed to the point of incoherence.