Bodacious Booksmart Brings Bevy of Brilliant Belly-Laughs

MILD SPOILER ALERT

It's the last day of High School for Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), long-time best buddies who have put their noses to the grindstone and spent all their time in High School studying in the hopes of getting into the best possible colleges. But on this day before graduation, Molly realizes that all the other kids in their school who spent so much time partying also managed to get into good colleges. There isn't much time left for them as high schoolers, so Molly and Amy decide to step outside of their respective comfort zones and go to a party for the first time. Sounds like a simple plan, but getting to that party is going to be far more of a trek than they could have ever imagined.

Surviving The Undead Inhabiting Zombieland Proves To Be A Recipe For Great Comedy

The two writers behind Zombieland are Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, a pair of individuals who are most well-known today for writing both of the Deadpool movies. Watching Zombieland through the lens of it being a precursor to the pair's work on Deadpool, one begins to notice some similarities between the two projects. Most notably, both are extremely violent works containing a large amount of dark humor that inhabit well-trodden grounds of genre fiction (superhero movies and zombie movies) with lead characters who have varying degrees of self-awareness of the circumstances they're stuck in and provide narration to the audience on circumstances that are playing out on-screen. Like the two Deadpool movies, Zombieland is also funny, even moreso, in fact, than the pair of Deadpool movies Reese and Wernick would pen in the years to come.

Extravagance And Subtlety Go Hand-In-Hand In Love, Simon

Just as many movies about teenagers in the 1980's looked to John Hughes as their creative guiding light, 2010's movies about teenagers turn to John Green for inspiration. Not every single movie about teenagers is like this (The Edge of Seventeen, for instance, isn't really all that reminiscent of Green's works), but it's hard not to see how the author of books like The Fault In Our Stars has influenced modern-day media about the struggles of teenagers, especially in terms of how dialogue spoken by teenage characters is written. I wouldn't want every movie about teenagers to feel like it emerged from the shadow of John Green, but The Fault In Our Stars was an extremely well-done motion picture, so I say there are worse films that movies like Love, Simon could be emulating.

Easy A Has Some Major Story Issues And Also Some Strong Humor And Acting From Emma Stone

Before the surprisingly high number of amazing High School movies we've had this decade (namely, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, The Spectacular Now, The Diary Of A Teenage Girl and The Edge Of Seventeen), before Emma Stone won an Oscar and before Will Gluck directed that remake of Annie I totally forgot about before now (I never actually saw it, surprisingly), there was the High School comedy Easy A, a trailer for which I saw on the sing-a-long version of Grease all the way back in July 2010. I had wanted to see the movie after seeing the trailer that fateful day, but for some reason, it's taken me nearly seven whole years to see the actual movie!

A Sense Of Authenticity Courses Through The Veins Of The Edge Of Seventeen

When Hailee Steinfeld came onto the scene in December 2010 with a fantastic leading (not supporting as the Academy Awards erroneously thought) performance in True Grit, you'd think such a turn would have made her a major commodity in the world of American cinema. Alas, any woman in Hollywood is going to find challenges in advancing their career and for Steinfeld she was boxed into co-starring as generic daughter roles to leading male characters in the likes of 3 Days To Kill and Begin Again. Granted, she was in Pitch Perfect 2 (a film I freely admit to not yet seeing) last year, but that's been the only major role of note Steinfeld seems to have garnered in the past six years.