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Girl Culture (Substack)

Girl Culture (Substack) is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Caroline Siede.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Sabrina (1954) Caroline Siede To quote Nicole Kidman, I come to rom-coms to laugh, to cry, to care. Sabrina, however, feels a little bit like a movie that exists in a snow globe. It’s beautifully crafted and mesmerizing to look at. Yet I always feel like I’m slightly outside of it.
Posted Jan 23, 2026  Edit critic review
Last Christmas (2019) Caroline Siede Last Christmas [is] about 75 percent of the way towards being a great movie. And while that’s not the worst crime in the world, it is the sentiment that’s left the rom-com genre struggling to thrive outside of streaming since the pandemic.
Posted Dec 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) Caroline Siede [Crazy, Stupid, Love] somehow manages to capture everything that’s great about and wrong with the romantic comedy genre in just 118 minutes.
Posted Dec 24, 2025  Edit critic review
The Little Mermaid (1989) Caroline Siede Over the past three and a half decades Disney has continued to iterate on what its princesses long for and how they go about getting it. But Ariel laid the groundwork they’re all still following today.
Posted Dec 01, 2025  Edit critic review
B-
Wicked: For Good (2025) Caroline Siede While 'For Good' wants to be a movie that inspires audiences to dig deep into its darker political allegories, ironically, it’s best enjoyed if you’re willing to turn off your brain and just get swept along in its emotions.
Posted Nov 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Sleeping Beauty (1959) Caroline Siede While I don’t think the Disney animators intentionally set out to empower middle-aged women, they did set out to mix up the Disney princess formula. In doing so, they stumbled upon a premise more progressive than half of what we get from the studio today.
Posted Aug 21, 2025  Edit critic review
B-
Freakier Friday (2025) Caroline Siede Far from a perfect movie and definitely a little overlong. But also so earnest and well-intentioned that it papered over a lot of the flaws.
Posted Aug 14, 2025  Edit critic review
B
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) Caroline Siede First Steps often feels less like a superhero story than an oddball standalone sci-fi film. And that’s the most refreshing thing about it.
Posted Jul 24, 2025  Edit critic review
C+
Superman (2025) Caroline Siede This Superman claims he’s driven by a desire to do good, which is a sweet and welcome message—especially compared to the darker Cavill take. But more often than not he just feels like someone the plot happens to.
Posted Jul 08, 2025  Edit critic review
C
Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) Caroline Siede To its credit, Rebirth features some of the best dinosaur setpieces the rebooted World series has ever delivered. Unfortunately, it also has some of the most annoying characters and plotting in any Jurassic installment to date.
Posted Jul 02, 2025  Edit critic review
B+
Materialists (2025) Caroline Siede Song and Johnson understand that the rom-com genre has long been a haven for women-centric stories that don’t get told elsewhere. So they use Lucy to reflect on the interiority of single women in their mid-30s and beyond.
Posted Jun 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Cinderella (1950) Caroline Siede On her own, Snow White could have just been a one-off fairy tale heroine. But with the success of Cinderella, the very idea of the “Disney princess” archetype was born.
Posted May 27, 2025  Edit critic review
B+
Thunderbolts* (2025) Caroline Siede Instead of another messy act of brand extension, Thunderbolts* is the first Marvel project in a long time that feels like an actual movie.
Posted May 02, 2025  Edit critic review
B+
The Wedding Banquet (2025) Caroline Siede Between Fire Island and The Wedding Banquet, writer/director Andrew Ahn has found his particular rom-com frequency—ensemble comedies that seemed poised to explode into screwball madness but instead unfold as gently as a whisper.
Posted Apr 18, 2025  Edit critic review
B-
Disney's Snow White (2025) Caroline Siede As far as live action remakes go, “have courage, be kind, and fight fascism” is a fitting message for the moment, even if it comes wrapped in a pretty garish package.
Posted Mar 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Caroline Siede Narratively and thematically, Disney princess films would evolve quite a bit over the next 88 years. But tonally and visually, Snow White set a template Disney has never entirely moved away from.
Posted Mar 15, 2025  Edit critic review
C
Captain America: Brave New World (2025) Caroline Siede Instead of feeling like the big, splashy debut of a new era for the MCU, Brave New World feels like the subpar sequel to a better movie that doesn’t actually exist.
Posted Feb 13, 2025  Edit critic review
A-
Wicked (2024) Caroline Siede [Jon M.] Chu set out to do something I thought was impossible and achieved it on a level I truly didn’t expect. And that calls for some rejoicifying.
Posted Nov 19, 2024  Edit critic review
C+
Here (2024) Caroline Siede Here is less of an all-out disaster than a movie with a fascinating central conceit and fairly subpar execution.
Posted Nov 01, 2024  Edit critic review
A-
Memoir of a Snail (2024) Caroline Siede A moving, off-color story about hope in the face of suffering, Memoir of A Snail is above all a love letter to the wallflowers and homebodies among us; the people who sometimes feel more like snails curled up inside their shells than human beings.
Posted Nov 01, 2024  Edit critic review
B+
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024) Caroline Siede We’ve all heard (or lived through) real-life stories of families protecting their problematic men over the safety of their daughters. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a slow-burn battle cry for a new way forward.
Posted Nov 01, 2024  Edit critic review
B+
The Brutalist (2024) Caroline Siede Like a piece of brutalist architecture, The Brutalist may be impenetrable, but it’s certainly impactful.
Posted Nov 01, 2024  Edit critic review
B+
Zurawski v Texas (2024) Caroline Siede In taking a small-scale human approach and by focusing on women with desperately wanted pregnancies, it seems designed to speak to those on the right as much as the left. Let’s hope they’re listening.
Posted Oct 27, 2024  Edit critic review
C+
Better Man (2024) Caroline Siede After lampooning music biopic clichés in its opening half, Better Man proceeds to indulge in them so earnestly in its second that the whole thing just becomes interminable.
Posted Oct 27, 2024  Edit critic review
B
September 5 (2024) Caroline Siede [Director Tim Fehlbaum] leaves questions about the ethics and morality of live news coverage up to the viewer to interpret, which makes the film a sort of Rorschach test in terms of how much depth you want to grant it.
Posted Oct 27, 2024  Edit critic review
B-
Blitz (2024) Caroline Siede Blitz is at its most powerful when it turns a lovingly nostalgic lens towards the sorts of British citizens who didn’t traditionally make it into Old Hollywood war films
Posted Oct 27, 2024  Edit critic review
B-
Maria (2024) Caroline Siede As a movie, Maria is just okay. As a calling card for the next phase of Jolie’s career, however, it sings to the rafters.
Posted Oct 22, 2024  Edit critic review
C+
Nightbitch (2024) Caroline Siede The film has righteous, relevant points to make about the burden we place on mothers [but] it makes those points so bluntly and directly that it starts to feel more like an essay than a film.
Posted Oct 22, 2024  Edit critic review
B+
Hard Truths (2024) Caroline Siede While the largely plotless structure may prove frustrating for those looking for a more conventional narrative, the small-scale emotional nuances slowly add up to a masterclass in tonal control.
Posted Oct 22, 2024  Edit critic review
C
Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) Caroline Siede If Folie à Deux were just a demented musical romance, it could’ve been something special in a small-scale, character-driven way. Alas, Phillips is somehow convinced that these Joker movies need to Say Something Important about the state of the world.
Posted Oct 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) Caroline Siede While the story may barely hang together, there’s at least an overall sense that everyone involved in this movie wants to be here, which isn’t always the case for a legacy sequel.
Posted Sep 06, 2024  Edit critic review
It Ends With Us (2024) Caroline Siede As a cultural statement, It Ends With Us doesn’t quite get there. As a personal exploration of what it feels like to be caught up in a cycle of violence, however, it’s a much more powerful big-screen experience.
Posted Aug 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) Caroline Siede Though the MCU has never served up the cinematic equivalent of fine dining, its films at least used to be hearty fast-food fare. Deadpool & Wolverine feels more like eating a bag of Sour Patch Kids and calling it dinner.
Posted Jul 26, 2024  Edit critic review
It Happened One Night (1934) Caroline Siede Really, what makes It Happened One Night special is that—unlike the rom-coms that followed in its wake—it doesn’t have to be in conversation with what it means to “be a rom-com.”
Posted Jul 09, 2024  Edit critic review
The Idea of You (2024) Caroline Siede The wish fulfillment narrative is turned up to 11 here ... but the tropes are delivered charmingly and confidently, which helps the whole thing go down easy.
Posted May 02, 2024  Edit critic review
Anyone But You (2023) Caroline Siede For as effective as Sydney Sweeney’s lethargic blankness is on Euphoria, it’s not an especially great quality for a rom-com lead.
Posted Apr 17, 2024  Edit critic review
B-
The Marvels (2023) Caroline Siede At its best, The Marvels is a delightful buddy comedy about three very different women learning to work together as a team—like the MCU’s more wholesome take on DC’s anarchic Birds of Prey.
Posted Nov 09, 2023  Edit critic review
The Little Mermaid (2023) Caroline Siede The delightful sits alongside the baffling in Marshall’s adaptation, which is so often the way it goes with these Disney live action remakes.
Posted Oct 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Red, White & Royal Blue (2023) Caroline Siede Was this a great movie? No. Did I have fun watching it? Sure!
Posted Sep 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Barbie (2023) Caroline Siede Barbie isn’t as streamlined as my favorite girl comedies, but it’s more thematically ambitious than many of them too. And I’ll take flawed ambition over plastic perfection any day of the week.
Posted Sep 02, 2023  Edit critic review
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