How to Have Sex
Directed by Molly Manning Walker (Not rated) ★★★★ A 16-year-old loses her self-assurance.
Think of How to Have Sex as “a sharp answer to nearly every losing-virginity teen comedy,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. The story of a spring break–style getaway that leaves one teenager shaken, Molly Manning Walker’s drama “becomes an on-the-fly examination of trust, consent, and everything 16-year-old girls deal with, on holiday or not.” Mia McKenna-Bruce is remarkable as Tara, the only member of her friend group who is still a virgin when the boisterous trio heads to Malia, Crete, for a brief blast of drinking, clubbing, and potential hookups galore. After Tara has an encounter with a boy on a beach one night that takes an unwanted turn, McKenna-Bruce’s face “tells us everything,
and many things at once.” This award-winning British film is “not necessarily a fully realized story,” said
Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. “But as one chapter, it’s extraordinarily vivid.” The direction and performances are “so spontaneous and naturalistic that the film often plays like a slice-of-life documentary.” Somehow, Walker not only persuades us to forgive Tara and her friends for their brash initial bravado but also “to grieve when it’s gone,” said Jessica Kiang in the Los Angeles Times. The first-time director has made “a different kind of Greek tragedy—no grand myth, just a heart-sore, everyday observation of what the world does to girls and what the world makes girls do to themselves.”