Opiniões dos críticos

Oddly, watching “Eighth Grade,” with its deeply recognizable minor tragedies, and even more minor triumphs, made me feel a strange kind of hope. Burnham’s ability to view and capture horrible teen dynamics so clearly and convincingly indicated to me that one could live to tell the tale. After all, hadn’t I survived? I had, hadn’t I?

A harrowing portrait of anxiety and acceptance in a post-social-media landscape, showing how all of us cope with an ever-changing, constantly refreshing world.

Burnham might have done better with a character closer to himself, one whom he’d have dared to imagine fully; instead, he admires Kayla uninhibitedly, and he fabricates her to make her unreservedly, artificially admirable. It’s a tribute to Fisher’s powers of performance that she renders such a synthetic character in such a hermetic context vibrantly plausible for the duration of the film.

A flourish can be empty, a flourish can keep the audience comfortably "above" the action onscreen. But Burnham knows what he's doing. Every moment is life-or-death when you're 13. These flourishes identify us so strongly with Kayla that every social scenario is pierced with emotional peril.

Burnham’s film has laid out a perverse dog-eat-dog landscape of teen monsters and addictive machines where such an affirmation struggles to ring true, and yet it’s a suspended, poignant picture of rare honesty.

There are few more poignant, exasperating creatures than teenage girls. (I speak from personal experience.) And rarely are they as heart-pangingly real as the girl fumbling through the sharp, smart comedy “Eighth Grade.”

It never strains for topicality or hand-wrings at the state of Today’s Youth: There’s a lightness and simplicity to this affectionate portrait of a girl dipping a first toe in the rushing waters of 21st-century teenagerdom.

Part of Eighth Grade’s charm comes from a refusal to go for easy confrontations or humiliations; it keeps threatening to become a cringe-fest, but pulls back, as Burnham opts instead for something more human and realistic. There’s a lived-in wisdom in the film.

Burnham captures the discomfort and urgent frustration of early teenage existence with a sharp eye for deadpan irony, and the result feels like watching documentary footage of one’s own youth, sympathetically and knowingly edited from the safe distance afforded by decades of accumulated wisdom.

One of the best films at this year’s festival. . . . Burnham’s debut film is hilarious, heartwarming and poignant.

I don't necessarily mind the YouTube monologues Kayla makes in an awkward stab at attaining popularity through vlogging, choked with so many "likes" and "ups" that making a legal transcript of them would be particularly torturous. I do, however, mind the way each one articulates sets up the theme and arc of each act. . . . The other thing that's killing me is the way the film resolves: with a heartfelt monologue from Kayla's dad (Josh Hamilton) that's warm, understanding and reassuring.

Burnham explained at a Q&A that a lot of the dialogue was more scripted than viewers might think, given how spontaneously and naturally Fisher delivers her lines. In that case, credit is abundantly due to both of them, because clearly hours of research watching teenage YouTubers has paid off for Burnham with an entirely credible use of teenspeak throughout, liberally salted with the phatic emphasizer "like," and delivered with that mock-polished, TV-presenter cadence they all adopt.