palo alto

Manohla Dargis at The New York Times put it best:

"Palo Alto: A Teenage Tone Poem, About Adolescents Stumbling Toward Adulthood"

"Here, under wavering palm trees, teenagers slip through homes and streets with the vagueness that comes with certain visions of adolescence. These aren’t the tireless achievers cramming for tests, and preparing for college and the conformity to come. They are instead the anxious children who have — since the likes of Holden Caulfield and James Dean’s rebel — defined American adolescence as a state of poetic confusion."

"What tethers the movie and especially April and Teddy is how Ms. Coppola captures that exquisitely tender, moving moment between fragile, self-interested youth and tentatively more outwardly aware adulthood, a coming into consciousness that she expresses through their broken sentences, diverted glances and abrupt turns. (Nobody processes his or her feelings; they simply are.)" (x)