When people ask me what my favorite movie genre is, my answer is always coming-of-age. It’s kind of a cop-out because coming-of-age stories are so versatile that they really can exist in almost every other genre– sci-fi, romance, drama, mystery, comedy– and they’re so broadly defined you argue that really any movie is a coming of age story: they’re not just about kids. Regardless of the cop-out quality of this answer, it remains my choice, and if I ever get the chance to make movies someday, these are the kinds I’d want to make. Within the breadth of the coming-of-age movie, one subset of the genre stands out as my favorite, and that’s any movie about a group about kids running around outside. They remind me of my childhood and make me feel nostalgic and adventurous and thankful for my friends. Here are a couple of my favorites that fall in that category.

Stand By Me (1986) is like the holy grail of coming of age films. Based of the Stephen King novel The Body, Stand By Me is about a group of young boys in 1959 who go on a search for a dead body. Over the course of their weekend-long trip, these boys begin to come to grips with the end of childhood and start to grapple with the pain of living in an adult world. It’s nostalgic and heartbreaking and funny. I feel so lucky that some adults in my life had the wherewithal to sit me down at age thirteen and make me watch it.

Super 8 follows in a similar vein as Stand By Me— it’s also a period piece (this time made in 2011 but taking place in 1979) that follows a group of kids around the same age as the Stand By Me boys. They’re amateur filmmakers, and one night when they’re shooting, they capture a massive train collision on film. The movie is about aliens and government conspiracy, but still tackles the same issues of growing up and grief. Like Stand By Me, the charming and hilarious interactions between the kids in the group are what wins the film, but it’s a great sci-fi story even on its own.

The most recent of these films is Kings of Summer, which came out in 2013. This one is about three teenage boys who, because of troubled relationships with their families, run away from home to live in the woods, where they can control their own destiny. It’s really funny and touching and it always gets me in the mood for summer. I definitely recommend!

Disney and Pixar movies (as well as Disney Pixar movies, now) are universally beloved, and for good reason. Each one is thoughtful, generally well animated and accompanied by a soundtrack or score instantly recognized (if not committed to memory) by most Americans. These films get so much love and attention that I want to take this blog post to talk about and appreciate some of my favorite animated children’s movies that fall outside of the Disney Pixar realm.Not obscure by any means, but underrated in my opinion is the British series of claymation shorts and features Wallace and Gromit. Following the spacey, often stupid inventor Wallace and his mute but shrewd dog Gromit, the shorts always involve some kind of absurd hooliganism that the two must find their way out of. Evil penguins, were-rabbits and capitalist bulldogs are three of my favorite villains/obstacles the two encounter. Most often, Gromit must draw oblivious Wallace’s attention to some grave danger that they are both facing. It’s full of slapstick gags and silly jokes but manages to never feel cheap– just heartfelt and funny.Last month I watched for the first time a movie called Kubo and the Two Strings. A classic hero’s journey taking place in feudal Japan, Kubo is an origami-inspired stop motion masterpiece. It’s a thoughtful tale of grief and family and choosing your destiny, and while some aspects feel predictable it is never uninteresting, and surprises you where it is most important. Led by a voice cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Matthew McConaughey, George Takei and Charlize Theron, the film has garnered near universal acclaim and two academy award nominations. You can see a trailer here, and if you’re interested in special effects and stop motion I highly recommend watching this behind the scenes video about how the puppets in the film work.Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is another visually stunning example of stop action. Based on the Roald Dahl book of the same name, Fantastic Mr. Fox tells the story of a family of foxes at war with three evil farmers that live nearby. The film is suitable for children but still handles complex themes. In classic Wes Anderson fashion the script is full of dry laugh out loud humor punctuated by very emotionally honest, melancholic beats. If you like this example of Anderson’s work, be sure to keep an eye out of Isle of Dogs, his second stop motion picture that should be arriving in the next year or so.

Because I’m heavily interested in interpersonal relationships and interactions, it’s characters that make or break a movie for me. No matter how thoughtful or stunning the visuals, or how tight the dialogue, I generally don’t enjoy movies if the characters are lackluster. This doesn’t mean I have to like the characters per say– just that they need to feel real and complex. Here are two (very different) characters that make their respective movies worth watching.

Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler is the story of Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a fearless, sociopathic entrepreneur who breaks into the Los Angeles crime journalism industry. Though he is friendly to the people around him, there is an extreme coldness to all of his interactions. He is constantly measuring what he can get from other people and what he must give to get it. It’s clear early on that he has no feelings for anyone, and no capacity for empathy. Nothing about his job (which consists of him driving around at night, listening to radio scanners and racing to crime scenes for footage of dead bodies, house fires or deadly car crashes) fazes him. He is obsessed with order and success: he lies, sabotages, and abuses his employees to get ahead. As the movie goes on, he crosses more and more moral boundaries until his sociopathic nature is fully exposed. It’s shocking and absolutely riveting to watch. To me, it’s his formality that is the funniest (and also most disturbing) aspect of his personality. He takes himself and his business incredibly seriously despite its seedy and somewhat illegitimate nature: this scene is one of my favorites, and does a great job exemplifying his personality.

Frances Halladay in Frances Ha

Stories about broke white 20-somethings living in New York are so profuse that generally the genre feels pretty tired to me. Frances Ha is the exception, and I think this is because the titular character is such a thoughtfully constructed individual. She longs to be a professional dancer, but struggles to recognize that her aspirations don’t line up with her abilities, no matter how hard she works. She blinked and suddenly everyone around her is grown up– moving in with their partners, having credit cards, buying art, paying their rent easily– but she doesn’t want/isn’t ready to make that transition. She wants to live with her best friend and play games and pursuing her fantasy career. These traits really aren’t remarkably different from those of the other lost 20-somethings that populate TV and film, but Greta Gerwig really brings her to life as a multidimensional, achingly relatable character. Because of her performance, watching Frances grow throughout the movie is extremely cathartic and touching.  

 

Ever since I discovered YouTube as a kid, I’ve been obsessed with watching movie trailers. I’d lose hours of the day clicking on trailer after trailer, amazed by the sheer amount and variety that existed. There was something so exciting to me about watching a trailer for an upcoming movie: the fact that everything beyond the trailer is a mystery, and that it was impossible to know more until the movie was actually released. The funny part is that once the movies were actually released, 60% of the time I lost interest and didn’t even bother seeing the movie. Most of the excitement, I think, laid in the unknowable.

Since I started getting more into movies, my interest in trailers has maintained its intensity, but my knowledge of upcoming movies has expanded quite a bit. Now I pay pretty close attention to the festival circuits, getting excited for movies even before the trailer drops just based on the team working on it or the buzz from Sundance and Cannes and other festivals. This extra knowledge narrows down the list of movies that I’m really hyped for, so it’s much easier for me to actually follow through and watch the movies once they’re available to me. Here are some of the movies I’ve been thinking about for the last couple months that I’m extremely excited to get my hands on.

Landline actually came out this summer, but on limited release, so I still haven’t gotten a chance to see it. This is director Gillian Robespierre and actress Jenny Slate’s second project together– the first, Obvious Child is one of my favorite comedies/movies of all time. I feel confident that this collaboration will be just as sweet and thoughtful and funny and human as their last.

Another movie I’m amped to see is Sean Baker’s feature The Florida Project. Baker’s previous films include Starlet and Tangerine— the latter infamously shot on an iPhone and of great critical acclaim. His films take such a humanist, non-judgemental approach to their subjects in the most refreshing way, and each leave me feeling warm and happy. The Florida Project follows a poor child living with her young mother in a motel in the area surrounding Disney World. I love stories about childhood and the worlds that children create for themselves. If it’s half as good as critics say, it shouldn’t be missed.If I try to express how excited I am for this movie it’s just going to end in embarrassment, so I’m gonna keep it low-key. Based on a book of the same title, Call Me By Your Name is the story of a 17 year-old boy Elio who falls in love with his father’s grad student Oliver who is spending the summer with his family in Italy. The trailer is really one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I’m obsessed with the visuals and the music (written by musician Sufjan Stevens), both of which evoke so well the nostalgia and magic of summertime. It has received near universal acclaim and is already being hailed as a classic. It’s going to limited release at the end of November, so hopefully I’ll be able to sneak away from my family’s Thanksgiving celebration in Brooklyn and make it to a showing.

The news is… really scary. Not that it’s ever been a great source of stress relief, but in the last year the news has become a wellspring of anxiety in my life. Every week (or hour, more like) brings to light some new disaster that seems more insurmountable than the one before. Climate change, imminent nuclear war, refugee and immigration crises, mass shootings, police brutality– there is no shortage of catastrophes that leave me feeling helpless and scared for the future. I’m certainly not alone in this. More than usual, this anxiety has been clouding my mind this week. It didn’t help that in my human geography class my professor lectured about demography within the context of the year 2050. I’ll spare you the details, but things look pretty bleak. Maybe it’s dramatic, but it’s hard not to feel like we’re very quickly approaching some kind of horrible dystopian future you’d read about in a book. Or watch in a movie.

In kind of a masochistic move, I decided to re-watch a movie that centers around the dystopian dread I’ve been feeling lately. Probably the greatest and most underrated sci-fi movie of the century, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men takes place in Great Britain, year 2027. A fertility crisis points to the end of the human race– for the past 18 years, no children have been conceived. The world is in chaos, and Great Britain has devolved into a cruel dictatorship, currently fighting a rebellion.   In a frighteningly spot-on prediction by the author of the source material, the country has closed its borders and is undergoing an extreme refugee crisis fueled by xenophobia and jingoism. The world Cuaron creates is alarmingly real– dark and dirty and violent, a far cry from the shiny, high tech future we are used to seeing on screen. With beautiful handheld long takes (this one is amazing but spoiler heavy) and a naturalistic approach to lighting and blocking, the movie emulates documentary style film making. I cannot recommend it enough.

There’s a moment towards the beginning of the film when a radio DJ announces “And now one for all the nostalgics out there. A blast from the past all the way back from 2003, that beautiful time when people refused to accept that the future was just around the corner.” To me, that line is like the thesis statement of the movie. It also sums up my news-based fear/dread/anxiety pretty well. Powerful people are making decisions like the future isn’t coming. We are ignoring what scientists are telling us about our climate, population, and natural resources, digging ourselves into a deep deep hole that will take lifetimes to escape from. We have to understand and really believe that the future is now. Call your elected officials. Vote at every election (November 6 is coming!) Hold your government accountable. As long as babies are still being born it’s worth trying to fix this mess.