White Bird in a Blizzard is worth seeing for Eva Green’s performance alone, and to experience the dreamlike quality of Gregg Araki’s individual, highly unique vision of cinema.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Gregg Araki's film suggests a hothouse melodrama that's been drained of the hothouse, the melodrama, and any other discernably dramatic stakes.
If the results are occasionally broad and schematic, the actors (Woodley especially) are anything but, and Araki has an absolute field day adorning his kitschy, 1950s-ish view of suburban Los Angeles with a string of showoffy colors.
Nothing really adds up to much, past a solid performance from Woodley and the energetic - if out-of-place - turn from Green.
There’s just too much good stuff to dismiss White Bird in a Blizzard out of hand, even if it does have a somewhat dull and desultory plot.
Younger audiences will see "The Fault in Our Stars’" Shailene Woodley once again excelling in an emotionally tricky role: Kat, a 17-year-old blooming into her wild years while reckoning with an increasingly unhinged mother, Eve (Eva Green, crazy-eyed and just this side of Faye Dunaway).
Because the tone is so erratic, it’s hard to know whether its anticlimactic quality is a botch on Araki’s part, or a purposeful bit of genre subversion.
It’s naughty, campy and wildly uneven.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore
Whatever its intent, White Bird in a Blizzard misuses most everybody involved, especially the dazzling young star of “The Descendants,””The Fault in Our Stars” and “Divergent.”
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
As detrimental as anything to the film’s effectiveness are the visuals, which are murky, lack compositional interest and do the actors no favors.