Eric Kohn, Indiewire: "With so many solid ingredients, it's unfortunate that "Red Sparrow" doesn't know when to stop, sagging into bland torture scenes and an underwhelming final showdown in its concluding act. Ever here, however, the movie resonates with a precise topicality for an audience reeling from the exhumed shadow of the Soviet threat. It's a near-subversive maneuver to cast the world's biggest star as an ostensible villain, whose complicated relationship to her job is all the more chilling because it ends on a state of complete ambiguity - with no clear end in sight."
Sandy Schaefer, Screenrant: "Jennifer Lawrence stars in Red Sparrow as Dominika Egorova, a celebrated Russian ballerina whose career is cut tragically short when she suffers a terrible injury during a performance. Facing an uncertain future and determined to continue providing care for her sickly mother Nina (Joely Richardson), Dominika is manipulated by her shady uncle Ivan Dimitrevich Egorov (Matthias Schoenaerts) - the First Deputy Director of the SVR - into performing a dubious task... one that leads to a person being murdered, with Dominika the only witness to the Russian government's secret crime."
Owen Gleiberman, Variety: ""Red Sparrow" kicks off with what feels like a Hitchcock climax, crosscutting between Dominika's calamity at the Bolshoi and the rendezvous-gone-awry of an American C.I.A. operative, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), whose meeting with his mole, in Gorky Park, gets interrupted by narcotics cops. But the movie is more up-to-the-minute than it looks - more so, even, than the filmmakers must have known when they were making it."
Chris Nashawaty and Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly: "One thing I found strange is that current faces aside, there wasn't much to place the movie in the year 2018. There was hardly any future-y tech stuff - a crucial plot point literally revolves around floppy disks- or fresh takes, style-wise, on what is a pretty le Carré-crusted genre at this point. I mean, do Russians even get to be the bad guys in movies without Bruce Willis in them anymore? (All actual current events aside.) Which begs the question: What does Sparrow bring to the cineplex that hasn't been done before, and better? I think overall I enjoyed the whole thing more than you did, though I could have done without some of the slow torture; I'll clearly never be using a cheese slicer again. But I do agree that there's nothing strictly necessary about this movie existing in this moment now, and it does feel like a waste of Lawrence's talents. In some ways, it felt like watching her get punished in mother! all over again, with more double-crossings and less cream-colored knitwear. Still, I'd watch it on a rainy day, or an airplane. Or a rainy airplane. Would you not go that far?"
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