Amandla Stenberg to NYT Critic: Eyes Off My Tits, Lady

Update: Amandla Stenberg has responded to Lena Wilson, read about that here.

Babe, get up, celebrities are harassing professional critics again. This time it’s Bodies Bodies Bodies star Amandla Stenberg, who sent a weird DM to Lena Wilson, the critic who wrote a negative review of the film in the New York Times.

In her review, Wilson wrote that the hot new A24 slasher comedy is “not special, and like its shallow characters, it is persistently unaware of its own inanity” and that it is “so intent on oozing cool-kid apathy that it serves up a whole lot of nothing.” It was far from the only negative review of the movie, with Rolling Stone’s K. Austin Collins calling it “heavy, laden, joyless, and oddly forgetful” and Vulture’s Allison Wilmore writing that it “feels like it’s being written by Twitter itself, the characters channeling modern social-media dysfunction without anything to delineate them.”

So it seems weird that Stenberg seemingly singled out Wilson, sending the critic a DM that read “ur review was great, maybe if you had gotten ur eyes off my tits you could’ve watched the movie!”

The only mention of tits anywhere in Wilson’s review comes in one line, when she calls Bodies Bodies Bodies “a 95-minute advertisement for cleavage and Charli XCX’s latest single.” To Wilson’s credit, there is a lot of cleavage in the movie but it is certainly not the focal point of her review.

On TikTok, Wilson posted the screenshot and said that she was “devastated” to receive the message, stating that she was a “genuine, huge fan of [Stenberg’s].” In the screenshot you can see that Wilson has blocked Stenberg, which is probably for the best but is sad to see for those of us who love gossip and drama.

Wilson seemed to especially take issue with what she perceived as homophobia in Stenberg’s DM, saying the accusation boiled down to “Local Dyke Cannot Stop Talking About Boobies.” (Stenberg herself is gay.)

“I’m posting [the screenshot] because I don’t want this person who has more social power than me to think that it’s fucking okay to do something like this,” Wilson said in her TikTok. She also wrote in the comments that “it also really seems like she might be going through something so. truly wishing the best.” I appreciate the generosity of spirit on display, but my read here is that Stenberg was just being a bitch to the person who wrote the most visible bad review of the movie.

There are no winners here! Wilson feels bad, Stenberg looks bad, and the fact that Wilson blocked Stenberg just means that we probably won’t get any more dirt on the situation. Bodies Bodies Bodies? More like Losers Losers Losers.