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.
AprilEncourage a Young Writer Day falls on April 10. Frankenstein, The Outsiders and Anne Frank's diary all came from teenage hands, and in each case an adult did one specific thing that kept the pages coming.
Coming of AgeSylvia Plath's only novel, published in London in 1963 under a pseudonym, about a gifted young woman's slide into depression after a summer internship in New York. It remains the benchmark for depression in fiction.
ChildhoodEvery 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.
1980sTimes 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) 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) 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) 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) 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) 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) 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) 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) 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…
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