coming-of-age

Saw this at the cinema in 1999 and, I think, never since. Memory had filed it as Rashomon-adjacent, with unreliable narrators and contradiction; on reflection the three strands complete each other rather than compete. A different and altogether gentler trick. Mostly it’s a time capsule of faces I then assumed were headed for bigger things: Scott Wolf, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs. A very young Melissa McCarthy turns up briefly. And obviously Sarah Polley, whose subsequent career rather outstrips the material here. Watchable, propulsive, thoroughly of its moment. And I say that as someone who considers the turn of the millennium to be a few years ago, not twenty-six.

Umpteenth rewatch and the nostalgia has gone recursive on me. Linklater made this in 1993, looking back mid-70s he half-remembered and half-invented. I’m now looking back thirty-odd years to a film that was already looking back, which means the object of my longing is itself an act of longing. Turtles all the way down!

I was reading Svetlana Boym last week and she’d call this the reflective kind of nostalgia: not trying to restore anything, just steeping in the ache of it, aware the ‘76 on screen never quite existed and that my own first watch has been smoothed by the same process. I get older, the film stays the same age.

What holds up is how little happens, and of course how completely that’s the point. It’s a last-day-of-school film where the freedom on offer is mostly the freedom to drive around. Nobody’s having the time of their lives; they’re circling the parking lot waiting for lives to start, which at seventeen is exactly what it feels like.

I can see exactly why people love this. It hands you a version of your seventeen-year-old self and asks you to forgive her, which is a generous trick. The complaints land too. Lady Bird is a brat, and the world Gerwig builds around her is conspicuously white and insulated in ways that are never interrogated. But Ronan and Metcalf are excellent, the latter astonishing at times. Gerwig directs tightly. Other directors would have added at least 15 minutes of exposition.

I really do like this a lot. About as good as these things get (not intended to be faint praise). Half a star bump.

I remember this arriving in 1990, though only as a soundtrack and a general early-60s mood; the film itself never registered. Winona Ryder anchors it completely. Charlotte’s neuroses are pitched exactly right, and the voiceover prayers are the best thing here. Ricci, in her first film, is unnervingly assured. Cher is a natural, somehow both warmer and colder than I expected and with less screen time too. She was forty-four playing a woman of about thirty-one, which no amount of presence quite sells, but it matters much less than it should. Bob Hoskins is charm in a cardigan and flat cap. The whole thing is far sweeter and stranger than its reputation suggested to me.

I don’t entirely know what I just watched, and I think that’s the point. It opens like a coming-of-age film about two kids bonding over a Buffy-esque TV show, then quietly stops being that and becomes something stranger. The Lynch comparisons are well earned. Schoenbrun shoots suburbia soft and pink, and the Alex G score sits underneath everything like static you can’t quite tune out. The broader soundtrack, Caroline Polachek and yeule especially, is great. What stays with me is how patient the film is about not naming what it’s actually about. For anyone working through questions of identity and dysphoria, I suspect this will matter for a long time.

Showed this to my eight-year-old and it went down a storm: the floor piano, the bunk bed, the vending machine. Everything a kid fantasises about adulthood, which is to say everything that has nothing to do with actual adulthood.

Watched on Sunday March 15, 2026.

Watched on Saturday March 7, 2026.

Highly recommended. A Winter Olympics Hoop Dreams, unfolding against a backdrop of national decline and the long shadow of war.

Incredibly affecting. Great performances. The way it deals with memory is stunning; the impact and feeling of the ‘Under Pressure’ sequence will stick with me for a while.

Fiona Shaw and Emma Mackey are both great. Didn’t care for the Vicky Krieps character at all which hampered my total enjoyment.

This will be a specific kind of young person’s favourite film for the rest of their life. 10/10 soundtrack

Excellent. Quiet, subtle, really well observed. Lovely to look at too.

Watched on Friday January 2, 2026.

Sennott’s great. Enjoyed the various power dynamics at play: financial, sexual, generational. They all helped amp up the anxiety levels.

This review may contain spoilers.

Enjoyed the weird little details of the world they’re in, and the final fight scene alone is worth the price of admission.

Slight, short, sweet. Monica Dolan is very good. Tim Key shows up in a brief Tim Key role.

The leads are terrific: so natural it feels effortless. And the production is immaculate, as always with PTA. But it still plays like a string of fascinating vignettes rather than a fully great film. The stakes stay too low, the runtime feels too long… though I have to admit, I liked it more this time. Half a star bump.

Beautifully shot and with some amazing performances, especially the leads. Would need to be twice as long to explain some of the decisions made by the characters though.