The show’s second season is structured less around storylines than around feelings.
The film increasingly gives into the sentimental clichés of the genre that it gleefully mocks.
A profound sense of restlessness and loneliness haunts Michael Almereyda’s film, which reinvigorates the biopic genre.
The film never veers into wink-wink self-consciousness that its opening might have suggested.
The series visibly struggles to spin an enveloping atmosphere around its ideas.
The last few minutes of the episode are suffused with the potent mixture of love and bemusement.
The show’s minor characters leave vivid impressions while surfacing some truth about the major players.
The tectonic shifts in the inner lives of Girls’s main characters sometimes bring them back together.
Like a Jane Austen novel, Girls seems obsessed lately with pairing its main characters up with long-term mates.
Like much of this season of Girl, the episode focuses on the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us.
“Close-Up” begins with a tender portrait of romantic devotion that the episode slowly, cunningly upends.
As it fixates on a set of characters languishing in their current situations, the episode locates the genuine comfort that clichés can offer us.
The episode’s title is an acknowledgement of the agency wielded by the show’s core group of women.
Even if “Iowa” is a workhorse of an episode, it bodes well for what comes next.
One of the more consistent and admirable qualities of Girls is its messy, funny, and heartfelt depiction of relationships as fluid.
It more or less resolves the season’s narrative concerns while simultaneously reminding us that such convenient closure is ultimately an illusion.
The episode reminds us that everyone in the Girls universe is still uncomfortable in their skin, per usual.
Makinov’s film expertly crafts a sense of dawning madness that hinges on its villains’ unspoken fury at their elders.
A year in the life of a young woman unhappy in love and uncertain in career, the film could easily be faulted for the narrowness of its worldview.
Breaking Upwards is an obstreperous, half-serious celebration of dysfunction.