Critical and LGBT Reception

The film received a great amount of critical acclaim, including a mention from Meryl Streep as one of her favorites of the year during her 2012 Academy Award acceptance speech. It was lauded primarily for the cinematography (Best In Cinematography at Sundance 2011), and for the performance of the lead actor Adepero Oduye. Of the film itself, New York Times critic A.O. Scott said, "Ms. Rees’s film is sensitive but not sentimental, attuned to sexual and racial politics without succumbing to didacticism or piety." Of Oduye's performance, he writes, "To watch Adepero Oduye, who plays a teenage lesbian in Brooklyn in Dee Rees’s splendid “Pariah,” is to experience the thrill of discovery."

The film also received a large amount acclaim from the LGBT community for the nuanced, realistic portrayal of the black lesbian community, as well as showing the many variants in gender expression within that community. Grace Chu, a critic at LGBT lifestyle website AfterEllen.com, wrote, "Instead of handholding the viewer through the plot, Pariah leaves some loose ends open, reflecting the ambiguities of real life" (Chu). Rather than choosing to follow a more stereotypical, Hollywood sort of ending where Alike finds her place in society and lives happily ever after, instead she rejects the place society has set for her and leaves for the West Coast to pursue a career in poetry. 

Spectra Speaks, a Nigerian writer focused on gender, sexuality, and women's rights, wrote of the film, "In the past, the dominant movie narrative that existed for lesbians on screen, for many, depicted an unrealistic social context: all lesbians are white and heteronormatively feminine."

A.O. Scott. Modest Methods, Big Ambitions. New York Times, 22 March 2011.     

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/movies/new-directorsnew-films-at-lincoln-enter-and-museum-of-modern-art.html            

Chu, Grace. ‘Review of “Pariah”’. After Ellen, 29 Sept. 2011,           www.afterellen.com/movies/92509-review-of-pariah

Speaks, Spectra. ‘Not (Just) Another Queer Movie: My Afrofeminist Review of Pariah’. Spectra   Speaks, 9 Dec. 2011. 

http://www.spectraspeaks.com/2011/12/dee-rees-pariah-movie-queer-afrofeminist-review/