10 Teen Movies That Are Smarter Than You Think

Bo Burnham’s directorial debut Eighth Grade is one of the few teen movies that actually makes an effort to portray the genuine teen experience. We follow Kayla (Elsie Fisher) into her final week of middle school, where she struggles with anxiety, isolation, and the pressures of an increasingly digital social life.

Kayla faces acne, panic attacks, an overbearing but well-meaning single father, and the discomfort of quasi-romantic moments with boys head-on, and lives to tell the tale. While the film is laugh-out-loud funny at times, and as cringingly awkward as the likes of American Pie could ever be, it manages all this via something that looks an awful lot like real life.

That’s because Burnham built Eighth Grade out of his own experiences in high school, and hired Elsie Fisher precisely because a) she was an unknown, b) she was the age her character is meant to be, and c) she looked like a real kid, not an airbrushed product of the pageant scene or Disney TV star.  And it works. The material feels familiar from our own lives and from teen movies, shaping a new aesthetic for the genre, challenging the very real and multi-pronged issues of social media, social pressure, sexuality, and consent - all while delivering the laughs and emotional moments we expect.