Eighth Grade

Eighth Grade (2018) follows Kayla through her last week of middle school. She makes confidence videos for the internet and cannot do a single thing she says in them. The film shows this without pity, simply by watching. It is Bo Burnham's first feature. He found Elsie Fisher on YouTube and auditioned her three times. His reason was precise: the other candidates played confident kids doing an impression of shyness, and Fisher was the only one who read as a shy kid pretending to be confident. She was thirteen, and she had finished eighth grade for real one week before shooting started. The strangest story around it is the rating. In the United States it was rated R for language and sexual content, meaning children of exactly the age it depicts could not see it without a parent. Burnham refused to cut it, saying it was not his job to show a reality suitable for kids but the reality kids are actually living in. A24 answered with free unrated screenings in all fifty states on 8 August. It cost two million dollars and grossed 14.3 million. Its four screen opening had the best per screen average of 2018 to that point. It runs 94 minutes. Good for: adolescence, social media anxiety, and films that stay close to one character. Less good for: the embarrassment is intense and some scenes are physically hard to sit through. The car scene is genuinely unsettling. There is almost no plot.