Jane Schoenbrun's followup to We're All Going to the World's Fair has been hailed as a breakthrough cinematic treatment of gender dysphoria. Maybe so, but it's a good enough piece of art to bear multiple interpretations; for your humble correspondent, it played as an almost shockingly effective evocation of How Things Felt, back before the internet made cult followings into malignant mobs, and more importantly, back before we — the collective we — put aside childish things and let adulthood take hold. Before the mundane obscured the magical. Maddy and Owen are miserable middle-schoolers: she because Dad is hot-tempered and violent, he because Dad is cold and controlling. The two bond over and take comfort in watching The Pink Opaque, a show that is supposedly for kids, but is also way too complicated and creepy for that to be true. The show's heroines are up against big baddie Mr. Melancholy, a moon man whose chief weapon is self-forgetting. Hardly the enemy of children; more like the enemy of childhood. After the show gets cancelled, Maddy disappears; her reappearance years later forces a reckoning. What she says upon her return is impossible, what she asks is terrifying. And yet. Owen says early on that he knows something is wrong with him, and Justice Smith's off-kilter performance makes that clear. Whether it's anything more than simply being a person is less so. (2024) — Matthew Lickona