On the Site's 20th Anniversary, Here Are the 20 Most Pajiba Movies of the Pajiba Era

Today marks the 20th Anniversary of Pajiba (hence the anniversary logo above). This is post number 64,027. When this site began, George W. Bush was still in his first term. Facebook was still limited to college students. When we launched, there was very little in this space -- Ain't It Cool News and CHUD dominated, along with Television Without Pity on the TV Side. We've seen so many sites (like Ain't It Cool News, CHUD, and Television Without Pity) come and go during that time, while places like Cinematical, Birth.Movies.Death, and Movieline, among others, are a shell of their former selves. Our friends over at GoFugYourself and Laineygossip launched the same year, and thankfully, they're still around, riding the choppy waves along with us (but RIP to DListed).

There's really too much to try and fit into a 20th-anniversary post. I don't know where to start or where to end. It feels overwhelming to contemplate. We've had over 100 writers during that time, many of whom have gone on to great things (The New York Times! Honest Trailers! the Scrubs rewatch podcast!) and many of whom are still here! Seth Freilich, my real-life best friend and law school classmate, has been here since the beginning, first as a television writer and then a co-owner who keeps this place running on the back end. TK Burton, Genevieve Burgess, and Alexander Joenks (who most of you know by a different name) have been here for over 15 years, and TK -- who has quit twice and returned -- is still cranking out superhero movie reviews. I barely see them anymore despite how close in proximity they are, but I consider TK and Alexander -- whom I met on the Internet -- two of my closest friends.

I cannot possibly name-check everyone, but I do want to thank several people for being massive influences on the site and what it has become: Jeremy C. Fox (now at the Boston Globe) started the site with me; Daniel Carlson is a phenomenal critic and our first managing editor (and his sister Sarah Carlson, wrote Mad Men recaps and was around for years!). I don't know what happened to Brian Prisco, but he started Cannonball Read and was probably our most eager scathing review writer back in the early days. Joanna Robinson (now at The Ringer) and Courtney Enlow were most instrumental in evolving the site into what it would become, although Roxana Hadadi (now at Vulture but still here in our hearts) and Tori Preston (still here!), along with Kaleena Rivera, have fine-tuned the site into today's iteration while Kayleigh Donaldson has been a hugely successful features writer here for the last eight years. Pajiba Love has been a mainstay since Stacey Nosek originated it, and it has seen the likes of Joanna, Courtney, Ursula Scully, Lainey Bobainey, and Mike Redmond keep it going (Mike, at this point, longer than anyone). They've all been huge voices on the site.

There were a number of everyday writers over the years who have tirelessly kept this place going while often working other jobs, people like TK, Alexander, Cindy Davis, Agent Bedhead (now singlehandedly keeping Uproxx alive as Kimberly Ricci), Jodi Smith, Kristy Puchko (now at Mashable), Vivian Kane (now at The Mary Sue), Rebecca Pahle (now at Box Office Magazine), Emily Chambers, Petr Navovy, and these days Andrew Sanford, Emma Chance, and Emily Richardson (currently on maternity leave). Thanks to Jen Maravegias, Nate Parker, Claude Weaver, and Alberto Cox Délano for coming in and helping out when my son got sick, to Hannah Sole for the Doctor Who recaps and for keeping Secret Santa going for the last decade or so, to Chris Revelle for finding highbrow takes in lowbrow television, and our current critics -- Jason Adams, Sara Clements, Lindsay Traves, Ali Lanier, Petr, and Melanie Fischer -- for continuing to write reviews that'd make Ranylt Richildis proud. Thanks also to Brian Richards, the Kramer of Pajiba, who has been popping in a few times a month for the last eight years and vanishing into the Internet ether.

Also, thank you to my great friend Lord Castleton for mastering the 5,000 word post (and Lainey Bobainey -- who is basically family -- for proofreading those 5,000 word posts), and my podcast hosts over the years: Joanna, Josh Kurp, Tori, and Dan Hamamura -- Podjiba itself is now over 200 episodes, and I've had more Facetime with Dan and Tori than most of my local friends since the pandemic (they gave me two hours of normalcy every week when my kid was in the hospital and I'll never be able to thank them enough).

Finally, I want to thank our readers. I love getting emails from folks who are like, "I've been reading Pajiba since college" or "since the Department of Homeland Security," which seems to be the majority of our regular readers these days, but I also love it when we still collect new readers who stumble upon a review and decide to stick around. We've had hundreds of people make real-life friends through the site, some have married (and some have divorced), and it's those relationships that I'll probably always be the most proud of. Our community has not always been easy (ahem), but it still means so much to us that you're still here, even if you don't comment as much as you used to. I was gonna start namechecking commenters, but realized that I'd be here for days. Suffice to say, thank you all.

Now, here are the 20 Most Pajiba Movies of the Pajiba era, which was an impossible list to put together. Impossible. Twenty movies in 20 years. Do you have any idea how many I had to leave off? Ultimately, however, these are the 20 I settled on, not necessarily because they are the best (although, many are), but because -- to me -- they are the most Pajiba-ish movies since June 24th, 2004. Did I leave off some of your favorites? Absolutely. I left off many of mine, too, but after a few days, I just had to stop fiddling with the list and settle on 20.

In Bruges -- I didn't think it was possible this late in the game for someone to inject fresh blood into the weird little subgenre that is Dark Comedies About Hitmen In Quirky Locales, but writer-director Martin McDonagh does a good job with In Bruges, his first feature film. It's not that there are no good ideas left; it's just that the entire psychic ground feels plowed under by Tarantino, Ritchie, and a dozen other followers who think everything will be all right if they can just throw in some guns and non sequiturs and odd townsfolk and hope it all turns out for the best. However, though McDonagh's film is enjoyable, interesting, and extremely dark, it works primarily because of the firm grasp on character and action he's built up through a lifetime of writing award-winning and pretty unsettling plays like The Pillowman. In Bruges has all the action and flow of a dynamic film, but the pain, drama, humor, and sharp characterizations could only come from someone who's spent a lifetime writing stories that rely solely on dialogue for emotional content. The whole thing is grim, weird, witty, and not quite like anything you'd expect it to be. -- Daniel Carlson (See also: Kaleena Rivera's academic exploration)

Shaun of the Dead -- Shaun of the Dead is to the flesh-eating Dead movies (Night, Dawn, and Day) what the Evil Dead franchise was to the horror films that preceded it -- a genre satire that doesn't stray from the genre formula, brilliantly lampooning while also paying homage. And like the Evil Dead franchise, Shaun of the Dead is the sort of cult classic that will someday inspire drinking games, the kind that our children will watch at midnight screenings years from now, no doubt half-baked, decked out in zombie attire, and sporting broken records around their "bloody" craniums. But what makes the film work to such brilliant effect is that, unlike other genre-busting spoofs, there is more at play here: Shaun of the Dead doesn't merely poke fun at its predecessors; it gently mocks its audience with knowing winks, letting us know that, while we may be in on the joke, we also make up part of the culture that the joke is on: the video-game junkie, the sales clerk, the half-asleep commuter, or the brain-dead pop culture enthusiast. -- Dustin Rowles

Brokeback Mountain -- Ang Lee is aware of his film's place in the world, that no one will approach it as just a romance and that much more attention will be given it than if the actors were nobodies, and his approach is, I think, the best possible one, low-key and matter-of-fact, making the story feel genuine and simple and true. Brokeback Mountain is a film of great subtlety and precise observation, a film for which the best descriptors are words like "rich" and "authentic" and, possibly, "perfect." After three viewings and some careful consideration, I'm damned if I can find a significant flaw. There are one or two lines of dialogue that I might change, and Gyllenhaal's early scenes made more sense to me upon the second viewing, but these are quibbles. In a medium where the important decisions are almost always dictated by commerce rather than art, Brokeback Mountain is as close to perfection as we are likely to get. -- Jeremy C. Fox

Children of Men -- Based on P.D. James' novel, the film is a dazzling balancing act: humorous but not comical, chaotic but not mindless, bleak but not defeatist. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the film is Cuarón's somewhat hopeful outlook. This year's other big movie set in a dark vision of future London was V for Vendetta, which traded on grand but empty statements in an exhortation to protect your personal freedom at all costs, even if it involves detonating major monuments while listening to classical music. But Children of Men is infinitely braver because Theo, despite all his world has become, still believes in a person's basic decency and the possibility of a just government. Luke counsels Kee to stay hidden, but Theo thinks she should go public with her pregnancy to receive medical care; when Luke says that the government will take Kee's baby because she's a refugee, Theo disagrees. His compassion, his willingness to forgive a ruling body that's slowly tearing itself apart, speaks to his, and Cuarón's, belief that darkness always brings a dawn. Theo's compassion only means something because of its severity; he knows the evil men are capable of, and despite that -- because of it -- he holds out hope. Children of Men presents a frighteningly possible future of our world, and Cuarón knows we don't have to let it come to pass. -- Daniel Carlson

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford -- Andrew Dominik is doing something amazing here, forging something Shakespearean out of the country's collective past. That grandeur and damnation comes out in the title, itself so long and somehow proper it feels like something you'd see on the stage a hundred and fifty years ago. When everything was finished -- the last shots fired, the last men gone -- that title, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, slowly lit up the screen. I sat forward and stared as the lights came up: Was the screen really so small? How had something so weak and transitory managed to support such a wandering, lumbering, heartbreaking beast of a story? It almost didn't seem possible. Dominik's film achieves something great and mysterious, turning those dime-book stories into something mythic and brave and completely affecting. -- Daniel Carlson

Zodiac -- David Fincher's persnicketyness is on full display in his latest thriller, Zodiac, and it's mostly to the good. He excels at using the visual elements of a film to situate the story in a particular world, but this is his first time using that approach to recreate a historic period -- mostly the late 1960s to mid-'70s -- and I don't know that I've ever seen it done better or more subtly. From the old logos of Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. that open the film to the costumes, hairstyles, cars, interior design, technology -- everything seems right on target, yet the period elements never call unnecessary attention to themselves. The soundtrack is rife with music of the time, but it never has that feeling, so common to period movies, of having just picked the top five hits of a given year. The choices -- particularly songs like Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and Three Dog Night's cover of "Easy to be Hard" from Hair -- not only evoke the period of the film and the mood of the particular scenes in which they're used but make ironic acknowledgment of the alienation and brutality of the killer, adding resonances that reverberate across the film. And Fincher's not just interested in setting the appropriate tone but in making his recreation as factually accurate as possible, going so far as to dig through original police files and interview central figures in the case. Every element is considered -- even bit parts, such as the killer's victims, are cast and costumed with a painstaking effort to give us an accurate sense of who these people were and what they might have been like. Fincher has made a film about real murders that delivers those chills without sensationalizing or trivializing the victims. They are acknowledged as real people and given respect; one of the film's standout scenes -- the murder of Cecelia Shepard (Pell James) and attempted murder of Bryan Hartnell (Patrick Scott Lewis) -- does so much to humanize those two people and make them authentic and complex that it could stand on its own as a brilliantly observant short film. It's a rare treat, for those of us fascinated by true-crime stories while somewhat embarrassed by that predilection, to walk out of a movie about a serial killer and feel not ashamed but as though we may just have seen an honest-to-God work of art. -- Jeremy C. Fox

The Dark Knight -- If Frank Miller reinvigorated the seriousness of the comic book character with 1986's The Dark Knight Returns, then Christopher Nolan gave him new life on screen by erasing the memory of Joel Schumacher's abysmal films and rebooting the entire storyline from scratch three years ago with the bleak, daring, and completely engaging Batman Begins. Tim Burton's Batman and follow-up Batman Returns were themselves overrated, overheated, and almost suffocatingly stylized, but their biggest sin was that they played up the absurdity of the character without making him believable. Burton once said, "Anyone who knows me knows I would never read a comic book," and that air of mild condescension came across on screen. But Nolan clearly respects not only the possibilities in the source material but also the very real pain that would drive a man like Bruce Wayne to the edge. Yes, it's patently absurd that a young man attempting to deal with the death of his parents would channel that rage into karate classes and building a rubber suit shaped like a bat, but Nolan grounds that action in a world that's palpably real. As a director, Nolan takes the story seriously, and that makes all the difference, transforming his films from good to great. They're the best superhero movies ever made because they embrace the character on a gut level and not as some pop artifact. The Dark Knight is a harrowing, frightening, uncompromising, flat-out great superhero movie, wonderful in sad ways, hitting the perfect mix of characterization and humor, bouncing between phenomenal action set pieces and the brutally human moments that place the film in a recognizable world even as it soars into comic book fantasy. Put simply, Nolan just gets it. He's a believer, and he'll make one out of you, too. -- Daniel Carlson (And for a 10th Year Anniversary retrospective, check out Brian Richards' piece)

Get Out -- I have nothing to criticize about Get Out. The performances are flawless, with special kudos to Betty Gabriel's mesmerizing and terrifying performance as Georgina, and Daniel Kaluuya as the lead. But everyone acquits themselves well, complementing intricate, intelligent, wickedly humorous writing and nuanced, richly symbolic direction. A sparse yet chilling score pops up at just the right times, punctuating each terrifying moment with note perfection. Hell, Get Out is probably the most perfectly crafted horror film I've seen in a couple of decades, and its genius-level subversiveness and political savvy also make it a blistering social critique. The GOP is going to hate this movie, and that's just one more reason to see it. Do your best to see it in a crowded theater because the crowd response will absolutely enrich your experience, and most of all, just enjoy. And White folks? Don't be surprised if the Black people have their eye on you when the lights go on. We know you're up to something. -- TK Burton

Short Term 12 -- It's funny looking back on the film now. The big draw at the time was John Gallagher, Jr., best known then for his work on Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom. It was Brie Larson, however, who would turn in one of the most memorable performances of this century, playing a staff member in a residential treatment facility for teenagers. While Larson's performance left a mark, the supporting cast also included Kaitlyn Dever, known at the time for her work on Justified but now of course, she's turned in Golden Globe-caliber performances in Booksmart and the Netflix series Unbelievable, in which her character shares the experience of traumatic sexual abuse in common with her Short Term 12 character. Lakeith Stanfield -- who went simply by Keith then -- played a nearly 18-year-old patient suicidal because he didn't want to leave the facility after his 18th birthday. Rami Malek is in this, too, as another staff member struggling through his first week and who, on his first day, makes the mistake of referring to the teenagers as "underprivileged kids" to their faces. Stephanie Beatriz also plays a supporting role, using her real voice here (instead of the one she affects on Brooklyn Nine-Nine). It is a beautifully wistful film, and Brie Larson is quietly commanding and serene, a damaged angel trying to rescue her flock. The themes are heavy, but Short Term 12 never gets bogged down by them, ultimately delivering an uplifting and optimistic film about the power of connection. -- Dustin Rowles

Edge of Tomorrow -- Time loop stories like this resonate so much when done well because underneath they're stories about experience. They appeal to that belief that we just never have enough time, and that if we did, there would be no limit to what we were capable of. There's a funny thing in the way these films have the running joke of walking in and picking up training, whether with power armor or the piano, at some arbitrary point where the protagonist left off in the previous iteration. There's the humorous beat of the confused teacher who just met the protagonist for the time. It strikes us as sort of funny, the idea of living life in these disparate little chunks that get strung together into real learning. But that's exactly the way real life is, only masked by the illusion we have of it running along as a smooth whole. But in addition to that humor and action, the film nails the human element. It's never forced, and is anything but a tacked on obligatory romance. It's the slow growth of camaraderie as the day is relived repeatedly. And like Groundhog Day, there is the mounting hopelessness of actually managing to make a difference, of having only the illusion of free will as interminable fate grinds on for the thousandth time. That crushing despair elevates the film from its simple story to having much more of an emotional appeal than you might expect. While the action is impressive and quite fun, it's in the quiet moments that the film really finds itself. It's in those moments that Cruise shines, taking Cage on an evolution from callowly just trying to avoid combat at all, to trying to unravel a way to win, to making winning worth accomplishing at all. -- Alexander Joenks

Mad Max: Fury Road -- Female leadership. Female partnership. Female companionship. Female camaraderie. Female mentorship. Female power. Furiosa's War Rig always in motion, always pushing forward, always dreaming of a better reality than the one in which these women are trapped. Hope, and the willingness to do whatever necessary to make that hope real. You know what I think about a lot? Furiosa on her knees, screaming in regret and anguish for the destruction of her childhood home. The pain of that moment. The bone-deep exhaustion. And -- most important of all, and the essential takeaway from Fury Road -- the resolve to keep going. -- Roxana Hadadi

Arrival -- Arrival is more Eternal Sunshine than District 9. It's an art film with a mid-sized movie budget and a large ad campaign. It's a simple, profoundly beautiful poem of a movie about nonlinear time, the power of language and the importance of not giving into our fears of the unknown. It's also a spectacular movie. Arrival does not take a familiar path. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, who has built a career out of Oscar-worthy genre films (Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario) defies sci-fi conventions and pulls out a surprisingly poignant and touching twist that's more soft and warm than gut-wrenching. Amy Adams is a godsend here, the cozy but vulnerable blanket at the center of the film, while Renner is pleasantly subdued, his Rennerness dialed down to a low hum. Ultimately, Arrival is about how we discover ourselves in trying to understand others, and about choosing humanity over fear. It's a hopeful, lovely, and uplifting film, a welcome departure from the real world but also a reminder that, regardless of what the worst of us represents, collectively we are a good people. It's up to us to ensure that our better angels prevail. -- Dustin Rowles

Hell or High Water -- In the basic verbiage of my plebeian vernacular, Hell or High Water is tight as hell. Clocking in at a lean 142 minutes, it is a badass ride from start to finish. While I clearly recalled the basic plot of Hell or High Water, the second passthrough was as good as the first if not better. One of my guilty pleasures is reading Elmore Leonard westerns, and this movie scratches that particular itch perfectly. Maybe because I'm pushing 40 and reaching Peak Dad levels, but there is just something about a damn good western that makes every synapse in my brain go, "Ooh yeah, that's the stuff," even though I'm the least outdoorsy, unmanly sonofabitch you'll ever meet in your life. On a visceral level, I f*cking hate rednecks and guns thanks to being surrounded by them, and yet, I loved the absolute sh** out of this movie even as it made me root for what are almost undoubtedly Trumpers who will readily vote against their interests as their recession-bombed towns continue to be bled dry by wanton capitalism. It's a very weird feeling that took a backseat as I watched two brothers do their damnedest to bloody the nose of a crooked-ass system and teach it to never come near them or theirs ever again. -- Mike Redmond

The Nice Guys -- Shane Black's The Nice Guys has achieved an incredible feat. It may very well be the perfect *insert any number of qualifiers here* movie. It's the perfect summer movie, the perfect Netflix movie, or hangover movie or date movie or... well, you get the idea. Is it the perfect movie? No, it's not. But it hits that elusive sweet spot of ease, and fun, and intelligent engagement, and more fun. Aren't we always looking for that movie that can get us to turn our brains off and just have a good time, without asking us to dumb ourselves down first? This is that movie. -- Vivian Kane

Zombieland -- In an era when the zombie subgenre has been pricked, poked, gouged, and pulled in every iteration, sometimes it's nice to go back to basics: It's not about pet zombies, or Nazi zombies, zombie porn, or capturing zombies on camera for the YouTube masses. Neither is it about fast zombies, slow zombies, smart zombies or dumb zombies. A good zombie movie -- and nothing has approached Zombieland in pure goodness since Shaun of the Dead -- is about killing zombies, plain and goddamn simple. In Zombieland, director Ruben Fleischer is in the zombie-killin' business. And business is boomin'... Zombieland is a movie built around frenetic, stylized (but not overly so) zombie kills, and the burgeoning relationship between possibly the only people on the planet that haven't been infected by a zombie virus (origins unknown, unexplained, and who the f**k cares?). The script (from Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) is flat-out phenomenal -- there's enough fist-pumping one-liners to make Ash Williams proud. And beneath the exploding heads, the delicious slo-more gore, and a few jump-scares that will give you hernias, there's also a genuinely sweet love story at play -- Eisenberg and Stone are the cutest goddamn couple since Jim and Pam. Moreover, Woody Harrelson hasn't been this good since Natural Born Killers -- a sh**-kicking bad ass with enough attitude to launch a line of hair products. Emma Stone is her usual sultry-ass self; Breslin, believe it or not, delivers the best deadpan; and Eisenberg plays, well, Eisenberg -- the best self-deprecating, nebbish hipster in Hollywood. And by order of the movie critic code, and under penalties of zombie death, I refuse to reveal anything about the extended cameo on Zombieland, except to say this: It deserves a series of one-word sentences in the most superlative nature imaginable. -- Dustin Rowles

Everything Everywhere All at Once -- Everything Everywhere All At Once is the most hopelessly optimistic film about failure you can imagine. There isn't an ounce of cynicism here to sharpen its earnest philosophical ponderings, and typically yeah, I would mean that as an insult, but I don't. It's as refreshing and uninhibited as an unselfconscious fart from a guy who learned how to enjoy life from a corpse. The Daniels -- the working name for the creative partnership of writers/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert -- seem to have taken the lesson of their first film to heart and let it all hang out with this second one. Even when the film's philosophy threatens to be too broad at times, the Daniels bring it back into focus with the surprising specificity of their filmmaking. They push the boundaries of how films can work -- how many storylines audiences can follow and how far the logical connective tissue between them can be threaded and stretched before we all get lost ... Everything Everywhere All At Once is a specifically multigenerational Asian-American story of mothers and fathers and children, of expectation and disappointment, and that doesn't mean it isn't also a universal story of acceptance and change. It depends on your perspective. The movie is a sci-fi flick, a martial arts epic, a family drama, a comedy. It's gross and absurd, smart and silly, heart-breaking and heart-warming -- it's everything in juxtaposition, seamlessly working together at the same time. It's whatever you want it to be, whatever you choose to focus on, because that's what multiverses are. They're choices. And if this movie seems too confusing or too meaningless for you, then all you have to do is focus on the bits that matter most. Choose what makes you happy. -- Tori Preston

Bridesmaids -- Of all the Judd Apatow-inspired bromances that have been released since Knocked Up, none have been as good as Bridesmaids. In fact, of all the studio-produced female-centerered flicks since Knocked Up, none have been as good as Bridesmaids. It's the movie that the underappreciated The Sweetest Thing aspired to be in 2002: A filthy f**king comedy that combines the better elements of bromance and old-school Farelly Brothers with honest-to-goodness heart. For everyone who liked The Hangover but thought it was missing something, Bridesmaids demonstrates exactly what its predecessor lacked: Awesome, hilarious women who can hilariously talk about their feelings in one scene and sh** in a sink in the next. -- Dustin Rowles

Boyhood -- When Boyhood came out in 2014, it hit me hard. Really hard. I am a big fan of Richard Linklater's movies, so I was intent on going to see the film in the cinema as soon as it came out. When it did, I went straight away, on a quiet Saturday afternoon, alone. I had a feeling that I wanted this to be a private conversation; that there'd be something about Linklater's chronicling of twelve years of one boy's life, from childhood to adolescence, to young adulthood --- filmed, remarkably, in 'real time' in segments over the course of twelve years of child actor-turned-actor Ellar Coltrane's life --- that would make me want to face it alone, and to let it wash over me totally, without the diluting effect of another person's presence. I'm glad I did. I needed that experience. In 2014, it had been four years since I had suddenly and completely unexpectedly lost my dad. Four years is just about enough time after an event like that for everything to feel 'normal' again, in as much as all routines have long since returned and adjustments both practical and emotional have been made and baked in. The truth is of course that after something like that you never feel 'normal' again. The old structure is no more. Even the foundations are cracked. You have to try to build something new out of the ruins. And you need help along the way. For me, at that moment in time, in that darkened room with the giant screen, Boyhood helped tremendously. -- Petr Navovy

Paddington 2 -- Paddington 2 is a story so sweet it warms the cockles of the most hardened heart. Moreover, it's a story that offers a path to hope. Just as Paddington recognizes his negative emotions, this children's film recognizes some of the truly terrible things in this world, from xenophobic bias to corrupt justice systems, to life going (literally) off the rails. Then, it shows us a fuzzy David fighting back against the Goliath of these big problems, not with a sling shot but with a warm heart and a hard stare. One person alone may not be able to change the world. It's not easy to choose kindness in the face of cruelty. Paddington shows us how one act of good will might spark another, building a community where people care for each other and can enact great good together. Though it's about a little bear, Paddington 2 entreats us to remember our humanity and that of others. Or, as Aunt Lucy would say, "If you're kind and polite, the world will be right. -- Kristy Puchko

Lady Bird -- Lady Bird is a soothing balm. Greta Gerwig's directorial debut is like re-reading an old journal entry through a lens of simultaneous criticism and forgiveness, with an outpouring of love and the benefit of distance. It is a female coming-of-age story that is both nostalgic and unflinching, and it will ensnare you deeply in its grasp. In her directorial debut, Gerwig has crafted a film that pulls together experiences that are both undeniably universal (the desire to attend your high school prom, no matter how hackneyed it may seem) and supremely specific (weeping to the Dave Matthews Band song "Crash," which I can say from firsthand knowledge was a very essential part of female adolescence in the early '00s), and which tackles issues of youth, class, and sex for which there are no easy answers. -- Roxana Hadadi