the leads are both charming and gorgeous to look at, but they can't override the tooth-aching sincerity of the script, or the cardboard conflicts that propel it; "Sun" just trades in too much silliness to ever really shine
director Ry Russo-Young excels at rendering those emotions with a singular sense of artfulness. In "The Sun is Also a Star," Russo-Young... creates a heady, knee-buckling mood that nearly conceals the weaknesses in story and performances
a teen romance that never catches fire; as talented as Yara Shahidi and Charles Melton are individually, they don't have much chemistry as a pair of mismatched high school students; The Sun Is Also a Star is simply misbegotten
a dull-witted romance that isn’t helped by its semi-topical premise; "The Sun Is Also a Star" feels pretty hollow and trivial even for a lightweight romance