The Wrong Girls review – Kristen Stewart fumbles through forgettable stoner comedy

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First time director Dylan Meyer’s female twist on the genre is let down by silly stereotypes and jokes that land with a thud Want to feel old? Superbad turns 20 next year. It’s been decades since the stoner comedy ruled the box office. In fact, the genre’s best theatrically released film of recent years – the hilarious buddy movie One of Them Days – didn’t feature any weed smoking at all despite hitting all the usual outlandish beats of a stoner flick. If the streaming success of Hulu’s recent R-rated bong-ripper Pizza Movie is anything to go by, audiences would rather watch this particular strain of movie on the couch where they can spark up in peace. The Wrong Girls aims to reverse that trend with a nationwide US theatrical rollout by Neon, the arty distributor which propelled Parasite and Anora to Oscar glory. Best friends Molly ( Alia Shawkat ) and Frankie ( Kristen Stewart ) live in a PeeWee’s Playhouse-coded stoner cave with macrame decor, a life-size cutout of Céline Dion, mu...
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American Graffiti at 50: a classic hangout comedy with a surprising melancholy

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George Lucas’s 60s-set tale of California teens offers some freewheeling fun but also a lingering sadness

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the postscripts that get tucked in before the closing credits, telling us where the characters’ lives have gone from there, are totally unnecessary, especially in a fictional story where their fates are better left to the viewer’s imagination. But in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which turns 50 this week, they are the most important part of the film, not least because two of the four characters don’t have much longer to live. We can feel that darkness lingering around the edges of Lucas’ dusk-till-dawn nostalgia piece about the last night of summer vacation in 1962 Modesto, California, even while its teenagers are getting into mostly light-hearted forms of trouble. This night has to end, and when the sun comes up, their entire world turns back into a pumpkin.

From the opening shot of Mel’s Drive-In, set to Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, American Graffiti seems to unfold inside a snow globe, an idealized past with invisible borders that separate it not only from the outside world, but from the future itself. It’s one of those films, like its spiritual successor Dazed and Confused, that has the quality of a hangout comedy, loose-limbed and goofily episodic, but laced with an air of melancholy that’s so subtle you miss it entirely. (That’s why the postscript is such a slap in the face.) It aches for a scene that had passed just a decade earlier, before the tumult of the Vietnam war and counter-culture, but must have seemed, even then, like ancient history.

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