Los Angeles Times by Gary Goldstein

Joanna’s journey of creative and emotional enlightenment — including the balancing act of trying to write when consumed by a day job — is managed with grace, tenderness and touching credibility by a wonderfully winning Qualley in concert with Philippe Falardeau’s smart, engaging direction and screenplay.

Chicago Sun-Times by Richard Roeper

In the borderline trifling but consistently amusing and wry period piece My Salinger Year, Qualley has the opportunity to carry the story, and she delivers an effortlessly endearing performance in a literary adventure that plays like The Devil Wears Prada meets Can You Ever Forgive Me, only at lower stakes.

Original-Cin by Thom Ernst

There are remarkable and rewarding moments in the film despite its lack of bite.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

This cast and this world make for a grand escape from the mundane necessities of life as we’re immersed in a coming-of-age tale like few others, one that should make anybody with a soft spot for Salinger and empathy for those who had to “manage” him just a tad envious.

The Playlist by Jack King

While My Salinger Year is not always successful in the larger debate it tries to have around how we can define authorship, and how the commercialization of writing infringes upon creativity, the film’s central narrative following Joanna’s conflicting aspirations as a writer largely succeeds.

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

My Salinger Year isn’t much, but it isn’t phony.

RogerEbert.com by Tomris Laffly

My Salinger Year sometimes drags and falters with questionable tonal shifts. But it’s never a complete waste of time to witness a young woman grow into her voice on her own terms, especially when her canvas is this cinematic.

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

Buoyed by an appealing duet of star turns from Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver.

The Irish Times by Tara Brady

Watchable, if a bit lopsided, it’s far from the catastrophe that some of the more unkind reviews have suggested.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

My Salinger Year often trips on the self-serious nature of its premise, and struggles with an antiquated quality out of sync with its timeline, as if trapped between the character’s genuine experiences and her idealized vision of a literary world that doesn’t really exist.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz

After watching the film twice in quick succession – a futile attempt at catching a glimpse of what usually makes a Falardeau film so immensely watchable (see the Quebecois filmmaker’s Monsieur Lazhar, The Good Lie, My Internship in Canada and Chuck) – My Salinger Year ultimately lands as a mere footnote.

San Francisco Chronicle by David Lewis

My Salinger Year, which is basically The Devil Wears Prada set in the literary world, is a film that feels like it’s ready to take off at any moment, but stalls every time it tries to do anything.

Screen Daily by Wendy Ide

The transporting power of art is a difficult thing to capture in cinema at the best of times, and this film struggles to do so, leaning heavily on a score which signposts the emotional content of each scene a little too emphatically.

The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij

The main issue with the film's screenplay, written by the director, is that it is trying to cover too much ground and yet be tonally light on its feet.

Variety by Peter Debruge

The movie doesn’t show a complex enough representation of either adult life or the New York literary world to offer much depth to grownups (it’s far more engaged with Joanna’s romantic life and dream sequences set at the Waldorf Astoria), which means that My Salinger Year must have been intended to inspire young women for whom 1995 seems like the ancient past.

Slant Magazine by Wes Greene

The film fails to effectively seize on how its main character’s life and work experiences have affected her as a person and artist.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

[A] bafflingly insipid, zestless, derivative film.