Is This the Best Film Ever Made by a US Woman?

Director Greta Gerwig keeps making movies adored by critics. Her debut, Lady Bird, received near unanimous thumbs-ups, and the same is true for her adaptation of Little Women. The film starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen as the March sisters has a 96% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Samples:

• "[T]hough we can't foretell whether time will be cruel or kind to Gerwig's Little Women, it may just be the best film yet made by an American woman," writes Anthony Lane at the New Yorker. Gerwig is particularly adept at manipulating time through flashbacks and flash-forwards, "keeping us on our toes," he writes.
• Moira Macdonald of the Seattle Times is similarly impressed. "I could list so many of Gerwig's wise choices here, but I'll ultimately say just this: This Little Women purist was moved to tears by this movie, and didn't want it to end," she writes. "Beautifully intimate, gentle, and wise, it made me—and all of us—part of the March family. And what better Christmas gift could we wish for than that?"

• At Time, Stephanie Zacharek sees a comparison between Gerwig and the book's author, Louisa May Alcott. "Like Alcott, she leads by example," Zacharek writes of the director. "She has made a film that's complex and thoughtful but that is also, at every moment, pure pleasure to watch. From her and Louisa to us, with love. The inscription is right there, on every frame."
• Add AO Scott of the New York Times to those in the thumbs-up column. "Without resorting to self-conscious anachronism or fussy antiquarianism, Gerwig has fashioned a story that feels at once entirely true to its 19th-century origins and utterly modern."

(More movie review stories.)