Female Film Critics 24/375
In Megan Griffiths’ The Year of the Fox, Ivy finds herself caught between girlhood and adulthood as her parents’ messy divorce pulls her from Aspen to Seattle. Her father is a scientist notorious for his lavish parties. As Ivy struggles with her burgeoning sexuality, a doting older man breaks open the gross truth of her environment.
Read more
Sadie has a disturbing power that sneaks up on you from an unexpected quarter, as a teenaged girl crosses the boundary from childhood to too-early adulthood. This coming-of-age story feels very universal, and would work equally well with a teenaged boy at its center, but which gets extra unnerving power by casting it as a girl’s journey.
Read more
Moody and pensive, Megan Griffiths’ Sadie isn’t your typical coming-of-age drama. It centers on 13-year-old Sadie (Sophia Mitri Schloss), who’s determined to do whatever it takes to keep her family together, despite her soldier father’s long deployment overseas and her mother, Rae’s (Melanie Lynskey), increasing loneliness and dissatisfaction with her long-distance marriage. Schloss and Lynskey deliver heart wrenching performances in this strikingly femme-centric film which shoots an arrow right into the heart of domestic disruption that results from faraway wars.
Writer/director Megan Griffiths gives us, with Sadie, a big screen character we don’t see often enough: an American girl, barely a teen, whose childhood has been defined by a distant war. Though we never see a battle, or her soldier dad, the war in the Middle East has created a void in her young life.
Read more