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Eighth Grade

The sweetly hilarious comedy about growing up is currently in theaters.

Alissa Wilkinson covers film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.

Metacritic score: 90

Written and directed by Bo Burnham, formerly a wildly popular YouTube comedian — that phrase alone may turn you off, but stick with us here — Eighth Grade is a startlingly empathetic, wincingly honest, and always completely charming story of a girl living out the last week of her eighth grade year and coming to terms with herself, at least a little.

It’s the sort of film that makes anyone who’s already out of their teenage years grateful that they don’t have to live them now. A sensitive movie about growing up surrounded by cameras you’re operating yourself, it’s a story that probably had to be made by a filmmaker who knows that terrain intimately. But it also captures something ineffable about the awkwardness of being an eighth grader — and so, in the end, it’s a movie for everybody.