Booksmart Review

A well-done high school movie. Starts out slow, but about halfway through it reveals the tricks it's been setting up. It's refreshing to have a female relationship that's based in positive rather than toxic emotions (yes, its four screenwriters are all women) while laying bare the inherent tensions in relationships between different kinds of people. Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever are rising stars, elevating every scene they're in, and there are plenty of clever beats. The movie's willingness to lean into its contrivances and dei ex machina is probably its greatest strength - one of the funniest bits of the movie entails tying an incidental character into the denouement. It's not all bearable - the movie's white liberal feminism comes across as too sincere for all its winking at the camera to do it any good. But given where it started, I was pleasantly surprised that it turned out as well as it did. The decade's second-best high school movie to feature Beanie Feldstein.