Adolescence 

J Brooke, Incluvie Guest Columnist on 'Life and Beth' and 'Sort of': while living one’s truth is freedom, speaking it as a mandatory assignment can become captivity.

Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) tells her mother (Laurie Metcalf) that she wants to live through something — something that matters.

Stand and Deliver is an inspirational classic from 1988 starring Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante, and his class of rag tag students in East Los Angeles. It’s the story of how a new teacher shows a motley group of students in the inner city with backgrounds as gang members, dishwashers, and mechanics — the power of self-determination. He teaches the teenagers to believe in themselves through algebra and calculus.

The differences in these films could not be more blatant, and yet Gus Van Sant has found a way to portray the same messages and use the same techniques in each.

I’m disappointed in The Woman in Cabin 10, but that’s at least in part because of my love of Ruth Ware’s novel.