Ladybird (2017)

The plot line of this movie is one that you have seen dozens of times before, but this is an altogether different presentation of a coming of age story.  And it is wonderful in the sort of way that continues to build for days after you have watched it.  There is just a glow about it that is well captured in the film's advertising poster.  I am so relieved because I love Great Gerwig's work, and this so far exceeds anything I could have hoped for.
Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson is a heroine reflective of a wealth of outsider identities.  She is at once In her bright, awkward, ambitious, insecurity-riddled and likable.  In its finely drawn portrayal of economic pressures and class divisions, the film cuts a wide swath through the “just getting by” sector of Americans that is rarely seen on screen.
It does all that with kindness, smart, often uproarious humour and a candid, feminine point of view that  makes it tacitly a film for the moment, a modest cinematic antidote to the horrible rearing up of the racist misogynistic culture of decades ago.
Setting it evocatively in George W Bush’s America of the early 2000s courts a kind of bittersweet nostalgia that’s hitting many right of the right notes.  It is soft but sober, it’s a film about how bad things were before we knew how bad they were going to get. It is sweet, bittersweet, a tangled mess of bad parenting and poor boundaries within families that can sometimes come out more or less okay in the end.