Movie review: "The Edge of Seventeen" (2016)

BEST NEW FEATURE
dir. by Kelly Fremon Page
High school as a setting has been slowly declining in the world of cinema for years now, the teen demographic such films would normally target increasingly being taken over by YA fantasy adventures. The Edge of Seventeen, arriving in a surprising wide release after a warm reception at TIFF, might not have the rating to necessarily connect with that audience - its depictions of sex and alcohol earned it an R in the United States, although it's saddled with a much broader 14A here in Canada - but its universal depiction of an older teen struggling to find comfort in a world which seems to be set against her provides a fresh, authentic take on the high school genre.

Everybody Wants Some!! movie review

dir. by Richard Linklater
BEST NEW FEATURE
In 1993, director Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused was released, a coming-of-age film which would later become one of the director's few entries in the Criterion Collection. Following the success of his 2014 opus Boyhood, he began work on a "spiritual sequel," which finally materialized as Everybody Wants Some!!, a film which features an entirely different cast but has been widely praised for capturing the same spirit. I haven't seen Dazed and Confused, but even with my relative lack of experience with Linklater's more modest films, Everybody Wants Some!! is nothing short of delightful.