The Greatest Coming of Age Films
September 11, 2026
Every coming of age film reviewed on this site, ranked. Truffaut, Hughes, Crowe, Coppola and Gerwig, plus the horror films that use adolescence as the actual subject.
Tag: Coming of Age
Coming-of-age stories capture the one transformation every reader has survived. This tag collects reviews and essays on growing-up stories: first losses, first choices, and the moment childhood’s story stops being told to you.
1980sTimes Square (1980) Review
September 11, 2026
Times Square (1980) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two teenage girls live rough in pre-cleanup Times Square and form a band, in a film that was recut against its director's wishes, had a relationship removed from…
2000sPrecious (2009) Review
September 11, 2026
Precious (2009) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A sixteen-year-old in Harlem in 1987 is transferred to an alternative school and learns to read. Gabourey Sidibe had never acted and Mo'Nique won Supporting Actress for a performance…
2020sGhostbusters: Afterlife (2021) Review
September 11, 2026
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Jason Reitman made a film about his father's film, cast a girl who is genuinely good in it, and then spent the last twenty minutes reconstructing 1984 shot…
2010sWarm Bodies (2013) Review
September 11, 2026
Warm Bodies (2013) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A zombie romance narrated by the zombie, which is a better idea than it sounds and is executed with more wit than the premise deserves. It is also…
1960sTrue Grit (1969) Review
September 11, 2026
True Grit (1969) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Wayne finally won an Oscar for playing a fat, drunk, one-eyed marshal who shoots men in the back, and the performance works because he is willing to…
2000sY Tu Mama Tambien (2001) Review
September 10, 2026
Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two teenagers and an older woman drive to a beach that does not exist, and a narrator keeps interrupting to tell you how everybody in the…
1950sThe Motorcycle Diaries (2004) Review
September 10, 2026
The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two medical students ride a failing motorcycle across South America in 1952 and one of them becomes Che Guevara afterward. The film's discipline is that it stops…
2020sMs. Marvel (2022) Review
September 10, 2026
Ms. Marvel (2022) rates 1 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The family material and the Partition episode belong to a genuinely good show, and they are surrounded by a superhero origin whose purpose is to place a character…
2020sIronheart (2025) Review
September 10, 2026
Ironheart (2025) rates 1 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The series that closed Phase 5, three years after its protagonist was installed in a film that had other business. A character handed a show on the strength of…
1950sGrease (1978) Review
September 10, 2026
Grease (1978) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A six million dollar musical that took close to four hundred million and never stopped playing. The songs are permanent, the leads are twenty-nine and twenty-three playing seventeen, and…
1960sDirty Dancing (1987) Review
September 10, 2026
Dirty Dancing (1987) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A film about class and an illegal abortion, marketed as a summer romance. Made for five million dollars by people nobody expected anything from, and still running forty…