Critical reception
Critics gave mixed reviews to the film, with a "Rotten" score of 56% on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes based on 91 reviews, making it Gosnell's highest rated film. Its consensus reads: "Drew Barrymore's effervescent charm is almost enough to make you forgive this teen comedy's incredibly silly storyline." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 60 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.
Film critic Roger Ebert- notably, at the time, the film reviewer for the real Sun-Times- was not as harsh on the film, giving it three out of four stars and saying, "The movie's screenplay is contrived and not blindingly original, but Barrymore illuminates it with sunniness, and creates a lovable character." He did express amusement at the deliberately inaccurate workplace of the paper presented in the film compared to how he viewed them, notably quipping that the hidden camera technology was not actually available for the paper- "and thank heavens, or my editors would have had to suffer through Baby Geniuses."
The film has since garnered a cult following. For the 20th anniversary of its initial release on April 9, 2019, Barrymore posted the following on social media:
Never Been Kissed was my partner Nancy Fallon and my first official movie at Flower Films. All we wanted to do was make something that felt like the way so many of us feel growing up. It's raw and ridiculous, beautiful and helps you decide what is important and what isn't. But we also loved humor. And if pain isn't mixed with insane laughter, then it doesn't work. Humor and humility are linked like besties! And everyone feels vulnerability while they are figuring out who they are and what they stand for. It also helps when you have the best cast and great music and everyone is making the same story! Josie Grossie forever.
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