This bombastic bid for respectability mostly left me thinking that their courageous, inspiring inspiration deserved a better movie, one with more nuanced plotting and a less overbearing score.
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What are critics saying?
There are powerful and enlightening scenes, and there’s a catchy energy to the battlefield action. But the immediacy and credibility of the women’s mission feels compromised by one-too-many corny moments, unconvincing dialogue and a sense of uncertainty on Husson’s part over whether she wants to take a poetic or realist approach to her tale.
While it’s less than the sum of its parts, those parts know how to deliver.
Clearly the director’s positive impressions from her research made her want to create something that would generate popular sympathy for the cause, but writing a glorified TV movie wasn’t the way to go.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
Girls of the Sun (Les Filles du soleil) is at once mildly harrowing and completely over-the-top, intermittently intense yet so unsubtle it winds up doing damage to its own worthy discourse.
While it’s not as stylish as Husson’s Bang Gang, Girls of the Sun is just as assured. There’s a specific political message at its back and it expresses it without compromise for better or worse.
Screen International by Lee Marshall
A mid-budget mis-fire after the director’s promising indie debut, Bang Gang, Girls of the Sun seems more concerned with staging sisterly bonding sessions amidst the rubble than in developing what might have been an intriguing story – about how war can reshuffle social and gender inequality.
Husson’s film is first and foremost an appalling account of stomach-churning misogyny and the sickening horrors Kurdish women met at the hands of their vile captors.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Girls of the Sun is a feminist war movie: impassioned, suspenseful, angry.