GIRLS LIKE GIRLS

No. Here's why, plainly. GIRLS LIKE GIRLS has real craft in it — some scenes, especially a reconciliation between a grieving teenage girl and her estranged father, are genuinely well-acted and land emotionally. But the film's purpose is to make you root for, and feel with, a romantic and sexual relationship between two teenage girls, and it pursues that purpose through strong, repeated, perverse kissing scenes that read as engineered for arousal rather than storytelling.

The film also frames any discomfort with homosexuality as narrow-minded, and even its "cop-out" ending — a girl who never publicly claims her love, out of shame the movie treats as a problem to overcome — exists to argue that the only failure here is not being out and proud. Add frequent foul language and underage drinking, and there's no responsible way to hand this to your family, or to watch it yourself expecting your conscience to come away unscathed.

One sentence: skip it.

Coley, a lonely, shy teenage girl still grieving her mother's death, is living with the estranged father she resents. At a lakeside swim party, popular girl Sonja draws her out of her shell, and a tentative friendship begins. As the summer goes on, that friendship deepens into something more — and Sonja starts saying "Olive juice," a cutesy stand-in for "I love you" that she can't quite bring herself to say outright.

Three stars means this is a competently made, often affecting drama — and that's exactly what makes it worth a warning rather than a shrug. The scenes between Coley and her father are well-acted and genuinely moving, and much of the teenage friendship-turned-romance is engaging on a craft level. But the film's structure serves its message more than its story: the last scenes, including the moment the movie has been building toward, amount to a cop-out, pulling back from the bold declaration it spent ninety minutes setting up. The result is a well-made vehicle for a worldview the filmmakers clearly wanted you to absorb, not just watch.

This film is Romantic in the old, capital-R sense: it trusts feeling and desire as the truest guide to identity and love, and it treats any resistance to that — shame, discomfort, a strict mother, a watching world — as the villain of the story. It is also lawless in the literal sense: it never weighs homosexual desire against any standard outside the characters' own hearts, and it gently mocks the idea that anyone's negative view of homosexuality could be right rather than narrow-minded. Layered on top are light, somewhat vague feminist notes — one male suitor is a jerk, another is not — that do little to balance the film's central persuasion.

To its credit, the movie doesn't only preach. The reconciliation between Coley and her father is tender and true: he did not abandon her the way she believed, and the scene lands because it's honest about grief and misunderstanding. That thread reflects something real and good — a father's quiet faithfulness. But the film spends far more of its energy building sympathy for a relationship, and repeated bedroom scenes, that Scripture calls sin, and it never lets that word near the story.

The ache under all of it is real: the desire to be known, chosen, and loved without shame. That longing is God-given — but Scripture locates its answer not in whatever feels true to us, but in the God who "created them male and female" and who offers a love that "does not envy," "is not arrogant," and "rejoices with the truth" (1 Corinthians 13:4, 6).

There's real talent on screen here — a father-daughter reconciliation that earns its tears, performances that feel true. But talent in service of a wicked agenda is still a wicked agenda, and this film spends its craft persuading you toward something God's Word calls sin, without ever letting that word into the room. Our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something to watch with your family instead? Start here:.