Streaming: Bodies Bodies Bodies, Sharp Stick and alternative nice info Z films

 If on-line trend reportage is to be believed – forever a fairly huge if, avowedly – generation Z isn't big on observation movies, succumbing instead to the shorter, smaller-screen attract of TikTok and YouTube for his or her viewing pleasure. maybe that’s one reason why there doesn’t appear to be a definitive canon of teenybopper films for the post-millennial generation – however then, Hollywood has typically struggled with capturing up to date youth once films tend to be created by their elders.

That inequality isn’t entirely fastened by 2 info Z-themed films out on VOD last week, although each – to the current craggy recent millennial’s mind, a minimum of – have chiseler teeth than several of their ungainly peers. Halina Reijn’s temptingly slick Bodies Bodies Bodies smartly weaves a critique of zoomers’ fast-evolving identity politics through the sillier, historically teen-targeted genre prism of the slasher movie. Lena River Dunham’s Sharp Stick takes a scruffier, less business kind to look at the synchronic terror and ecstasy of sexual discovery. each strike Pine Tree State as essential, illuminating viewing, whether or not the children are looking them or not.

By tartly satirising the language and psychology of cancel culture, safe spaces and performative social justice, Bodies Bodies Bodies is the one perhaps most sympathetic to an older adult’s jaded point of view. Reijn, the Dutch director who debuted with the highly provocative rape thriller Instinct (2019), is herself a Gen X-er, and Sarah DeLappe’s clever, booby-trapped script (based on a story by Kristen Roupenian, of viral Cat Person fame) is good-humoured but also quite generous in its portrayal of university students figuring out the extent and limitations of their privilege. The social barriers between them is brought into relief by the traditionally class-conscious framework of the country house murder-mystery, transplanted to a very American McMansion. Performed with shouty gusto by a terrific cast – with Shiva Baby star Rachel Sennott the standout as an entitled, glowstick-wielding dimwit – it’s a witty, nasty time capsule.

Sharp Stick, meanwhile, proves that Lena Dunham’s aptitude for articulating young female desire and unrest isn’t limited to her own generational self-portraits. Her first film as a director since 2010’s Tiny Furniture depicts a delayed adolescence of sorts, centring on Sarah Jo (a remarkable Kristine Froseth), a 26-year-old virgin still processing the trauma of a teenage hysterectomy. Her eventual, halting discoveries of sexual pleasure and pornography take a misdirected turn with a far older man. Dunham presents her heady, vulnerable journey with a frankness that never turns lurid, and a concern that never sinks into moralistic finger-wagging, weighing up the perils and thrilling liberties of shaping your sexual identity online.

Against Sharp Stick, the glossy generational portraiture of recent Zoomer comedies such as Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s Do Revenge (Netflix) and Quinn Shephard’s Not Okay (Disney+) feels flimsy by comparison, though both these satires of social media dangers have their poppy pleasures. In the former, an act of revenge porn prompts its own revenge mission in turn, with toxic masculinity an easy target. The latter offers slightly more conflicted motives as an aspiring influencer lies about witnessing a terrorist attack, and isn’t prepared for the consequences. Both films hinge on broadly stereotyped characters to carry what social commentary they have to offer. Neither is quite as well-drawn as Olivia Wilde’s much-loved Booksmart (2019), a semi-sweet friendship study, beautifully played by Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein, with something to say about the strange, suspended reality of high school social hierarchies and how they crumble in the outside world.

Breaking into a genre dominated by female directors and perspectives, however, Bo Burnham’s exquisite Eighth Grade might still be cinema’s best, most funny-tender portrayal of adolescence lived in the glare of the webcam and the smartphone. Even after four years, there’s already a quaintness to its depiction of the vlogging through which shy 13-year-old Kayla (the wonderful Elsie Fisher) figures out who she is, and who she wants to be. Teens grow fast, technology faster, and Burnham’s film delicately captures a particular pre-pandemic state of being and expression. Generation Z’s progression on film has only just begun.