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A teenage dream: that someone will follow you around with a movie camera, coaxing out your most sensitive and insightful innermost thoughts, giving your dramas the scope and flair of cinema, for an audience that will eventually marvel at how interesting you are... Now—as relieved as you are that no one actually made a movie of your transition from high school to college, be equally glad that Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton documented three years in the lives of the girls of All This Panic.

The camera keeps as close as a best friend, catching the teens in artfully blurred compositions and the softest of natural light. Yet through often banal conversations about hookups and hanging out, Ms. Gage remains alert to each telling, throwaway remark. As a result, "All This Panic" can feel glancing, its more painful revelations sliding in unheralded and slipping away just as quietly. What's left is a dreamy diary of a time that passes so quickly yet impacts so profoundly.

Shot over a period of three years and as intimate and confessional as a teenage sleepover, this strikingly cinematic vérité documentary follows a group of adolescent girls poised between childhood and the adult world... A wisp of a thing at 79 minutes, the film punches above its weight when it comes to quietly life-changing insights into the tricky business of growing up.

A slender, artfully shot, loosely structured documentary that captures moments in the lives of seven mostly middle-class New York City girls as they blossom over a three-year period, "All This Panic" is more remarkable for the way it looks than the actual, somewhat banal, girl-talk content.

Well-traversed though the coming-of-age genre may be, Jenny Gage's documentary All This Panic, now at Tribeca, injects a much needed air of naturalism into depictions of the female adolescent experience, as it charts the ebbs and flows of middle-to-upper-class bohemian New Yorkers.

Impressively locked in, edited for speed and emotional impact, and exponentially more complex than most depictions of contemporary teen girls in either fiction or non-fiction filmmaking, All This Panic is an empathetic rush translating their experiences into something even the oldest and most mystified among us can understand.

Taken individually, almost every scene in All This Panic feels vivid and true, but all together they're a bit too unconnected and episodic to achieve real emotional heft. But there's plenty of life in this honest, impressionistic portrait of a cohort of 21st-century American girls.

Moments that would be mere minutiae in lesser films — Lena suddenly shrinking from Ginger's touchy-feely affection, which she's begun to outgrow, or two feuding sisters wearing headphones to block each other out on the subway — are presented by Gage with astonishing pathos and crack timing.