Booksmart

...witty, raucous, perfectly played and eventually packs an emotional wallop.

Booksmart is a loving and endearing piece of filmmaking - wickedly funny and adventurous - and a jaw dropping directorial debut from Wilde.

It's raunchy and kind of gross at times, but there is such heart, sweetness, and honesty about high school.

It sounds like such a cliche but you will literally laugh and cry, and flash back to your own teenage days with fondness, not horror.

First, the good news: it's immediately clear that Wilde is a filmmaker by vocation... If anything, the film is polished to a fault: the marketing term "elevated genre," most frequently applied to horror, feels equally apt here.

Booksmart is such a smart, funny, rude, cheerful, likeable movie. It's well worth checking out, even if your school days are a distant memory.

Booksmart is a mostly sweet film that works hard to show the full depth of a female friendship. Showcasing two up-and-coming highly-talented actors, it's a movie that holds up well against other recent notable comedies.

It's certainly on the better end of the spectrum, but transcendent, it's not.

Like its main characters Booksmart is an overachiever that knows how to have a good time.

Refreshingly, the film's generous spirit extends to all its characters, whether geek or jock or cool kid. Unlike almost every other high-school movie, no one here is a mean girl in need of a comeuppance.