Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 88% of 274 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.6/10. The website's consensus reads: "Although She Said struggles to add cinematic flair to its fact-based story, it remains a worthy, well-acted tribute to journalistic integrity." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 74 out of 100, based on 51 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, and those at PostTrak gave the film an 89% overall.
Writing for AP News, Jocelyn Noveck described the film as not only "a worthy entry to a film genre that includes Spotlight and of course All the President's Men", but also a testament to "the power of journalism... [and] courage, from the women who suffered sexual harassment or assault at Weinstein's hands and came forward at personal risk — to their careers, reputations or well-being."
Critics praised the film for its sensitivity to sexual assault survivors and its non-sensationalist approach, with Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post, commenting: "Schrader films She Said with a bracing combination of straightforwardness and sensitivity, staging the most prurient details of Weinstein's cases with somber restraint rather than salacious literalism." Kristy Puchko of Mashable wrote: "Sexual assault and harassment are not made a spectacle in She Said, as it was in the Fox News-centered docudrama Bombshell. Instead, the details of the allegations are shared, not shown... Schrader trusts we don't need to see what happened to believe these women's stories."
Rolling Stone's David Fear wrote there is "a genuine sense of how deep and how wide all of [Weinstein's] cover-ups went. It's a story about survivors, but also about systematic sexism, systematic abuse, systematic intimidation, systematic despair over anything changing. Only the last part gets partially redressed." Fear also noted the film "doesn't pretend that wrongs have been righted once and for all. It just wants to pay tribute to two people who stood up to a Goliath and took him down not with one good shot but a million tiny cuts and a lot of hard work."
Praise was given to Mulligan and Kazan, in addition to the ensemble cast. Kate Erbland of IndieWire wrote: "Megan may be the more outwardly cool, calm, and collected one, but Mulligan — always so good at playing women on the edge — brings obvious conflict to the role", while Justin Chang of NPR wrote: "Kazan emphasizes Kantor's empathy, her skill at building trust and coaxing information out of even the most reluctant sources." Entertainment Weekly's Leah Greenblatt wrote: "The ever-reliable Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle bring a tensile fury and vulnerability to two of the film's most memorable accusers, and Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher have the built-in gravitas to play Kantor and Twohey's suffer-no-fools editors as they methodically track down the tramautized, the complicit, and the less-than-innocent bystanders who will eventually allow them to publish their bombshell report."
Reviews also noted that the film marks a departure from previous journalism films by centering on the two women who broke the story. Stephanie Zacharek of Time wrote: "Instead of hardworking men in their shirtsleeves running around a newsroom, possibly making the occasional call home to check in on their wives and kids, in She Said we see Twohey... at home on maternity leave, struggling with postpartum depression, and Kantor thanking her preteen daughter for helping to pacify her younger, needier sister. As reporters, they're tireless. As moms, they're tired... That's what gives She Said its believable texture. That and the fact that, regardless of this story's ultimately explosive impact, She Said is simply a story of journalists at work." Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian commented: "I admire the way it takes the macho cliched nonsense out of journalism in movies: these are not boozy guys being adorable and chaotic, but smart, persistent people doggedly doing their job." Others were more mixed about the film's depiction of the journalists' home lives, with Noveck saying "there just isn't time for enough backstory, so [the scenes] feel cursory." Bloomberg News' Esther Zuckerman felt the scenes' inclusion made for a narratively disjointed film.
More critical reviews opined the film struggles to bring suspense or a sense of urgency to its story, since the events on which it is based on are public knowledge. Scout Tafoya of RogerEbert.com described it as an "artless Wikipedia entry of an Oscar competitor." Though her review was generally positive, Greenblatt commented: "What the movie does to humanize both these women — and their skittish, often terrified witnesses — feels more fully realized than the procedural bits, which often tend to come off like a broad discourse on How Journalism Works." Puchko wrote: "Where She Said trips up is in its ardent need to play like a prestige biopic, wallowing in the heroes' noble intentions and important contributions to the world but forgetting that these characters should also be exciting to watch." Puchko added "Megan and Jodi [as characters] feel too polished to feel real", and concluded: "In short, She Said is good. But grubbiness could have made it great."
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