Directed by Stephen Chbosky
(PG-13)
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
This coming-of-age movie “seems like the work of a much more experienced director” than the rookie who made it, said Ian Buckwalter in TheAtlantic.com. Adapting his own popular young-adult novel, Stephen Chbosky managed to enlist “a pitch-perfect crew of actors” while fully embracing film’s unique ability to convey emotion. Set in 1991, his story follows a misfit freshman taken in by a group of older teens who’ve made peace with their outsider status. “Practically every scene—many of them painful—rings honest and true,” said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. Which is laudable, considering that the film could have been a “cliché-fest.” But let’s not forget that it’s all built on “the lovely delusion” that “outcasts are the hippest kids around,” said Richard Corliss in Time. Elevating this pat tale, Harry Potter alum Emma Watson “makes a smooth matriculation” into her first naturalistic role, and Logan Lerman is “a one-boy cute festival” as the frosh she takes under her wing. Yet “the niftiest perk” has to be Ezra Miller’s turn as their gay pal. He’s the “Auntie Mame of eccentric teens.”
-
August 23 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday's political cartoons include deficit dimness, steamroller-in-chief, and more
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
