Damsels in Distress

Directed by Whit Stillman

(PG-13)

**

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“Innocence deserted teen movies ages ago, but it makes a comeback, revived and romanticized,” in this peculiar comedy, said Richard Corliss in Time. In his first film since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, writer/director Whit Stillman conjures a college campus lost in time, a place where conversation is smart and polite and characters randomly break out into song-and-dance routines. Greta Gerwig stars as the leader of a clique of well-groomed sophomores attempting to lift the spirits of depressed classmates by encouraging good hygiene and tap-dancing. It’s easy to get “swept away by how original Damsels is, and how funny,” said Noel Murray in the A.V. Club. “Stillman appears to be at least superficially on the side of the snobs,” but he also depicts his class overdogs as possibly crazy. But the “studied dottiness” of the film eventually grows tiresome, said Stephanie Zacharek in Movieline.com. “The movie’s pleasures supposedly lie in its casual, disorganized nature,” but it acquires the feel of a project made with trust-fund money—“the work of a gentleman filmmaker who doesn’t have to work.”