Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 2019) USA

Reviewed by Kaio Farkouh.

Directed by Olivia Wilde “Booksmart” is the first movie directed by the female actress, in which she tells a story about a true friendship between the characters Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein), where they find themselves at the end of High School heading towards graduation and then college, and looking at others and seeing that they did not have fun through college like the others did, which make them go wild for a least the night before graduation.

The movie has an amazing cast, which every students bring something to the table in a not predictable way. You have that cool guy, that the girls like, and the stupid one, and you also have the gay character and the black character. It is a cast with a lot of diversity, and no one of them fells like some kind of cliche meaning to the viewer. Even though the cast is amazing, what stood out for me are the friendship between Amy and Molly. At the start of the movie you buy their friendship, and you want to see more of them, because they have such a good chemistry and they are both very funny in their ways.

As her first movie, Olivia Wilde does an incredible job of telling such a good and funny story with a lot of heart and soul in it. She does something very difficult, which is talks about a lot of themes and things we go through high school/college without feeling out of context or meaningless. She does that with such a good rhythm and pace that I never felt like the movie was trying to say a lot of things, but at the end could not say anything at all.

“Booksmart” is one of my favorites movies of the year so far. It has a great cast, an amazing chemistry between our main characters in a movie that is very funny and still manages to tell us a lot about labeling people, friendships, our own mistakes and personal growth. I’m looking forward to what Olivia Wilde does next.


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