Critic Reviews

I was haunted afterward by its seething rage at the malicious paternalism and sexual hypocrisy of fundamentalist Christians.

The performance by Ross invests Jessie with a kind of zealous hope that is touching: Here is a slutty loser touched by the divine, and transformed.

An unconventional fairy-tale. There are no monsters to kill, the Prince character doesn't strike you as too charming, and the heroine is not the fairest maiden in the land.

Rough-edged but affecting drama.

The film is never quite as startling or mysterious as it seems to want to be, leaving it in an uncertain cinematic limbo.

Ms. Kampmeier never brings her themes into tight focus. At one moment, the film is a detailed but familiar attack on smothering small towns and oppressive family structures; at another, it's a fable of feminist empowerment with an oddly fervent religious background.

Many of Kampmeier's characters are either ill-defined or clichéd.

So much of Virgin is bunk masquerading as sexual politics.

An unfortunately muddled portrait of a teenage girl going through a moral and spiritual crisis.

Shot on shaky-cam digital video, filtered through what appears to be an old sweatsock, the film mimics Dogme-style realism in its vision of modern persecution, but in the end, it offers the sort of touchy-feely mysticism that belongs to the crystal-ball and tarot-reading set.