17. Girlhood
In this movie, Sciamma’s take on the travails of a young black girl growing up in the tough suburbs of Paris, negotiating gang politics, criminality and her own burgeoning sexuality, is shot through with a vibrant sense of life. According her young, exclusively black, almost exclusively female cast a degree of honest agency and respect that this segment is very rarely accorded on film. Sciamma’s movie is much more than an exercise in political correctness, delivering a thrilling and often poetic meditation of the quest for self-identity in a modern urban setting that transcends all its to become something truly universal and achingly relatable. It’s a film about early adulthood that makes deep, chiming sense to anyone who ever made that transition themselves.