I'm resistant to seeing it because I'm apparently supposed to love it because muh female directors. But I've heard it's good .
I watched it because I wanted to see how it depicted 2002 and 2003, the novelty of an early 2000s period piece was really intriguing to me.
And I was actually very impressed with how it captured the time period, like really impressed, it didn't do what a lesser movie does when depicting a certain time, the soundtrack wasn't hit songs of the era, people weren't using whatever cutting edge tech was available at the time and the fashions weren't simply taken from commercials (think Adam Sandler's The Wedding Singer as the worst example of that sort of thing)
Instead Ladybird and her mom are listening to an audiobook on cassette tapes, nobody has an ipod, nobody I knew in 2002 had one, she doesn't have a 2002 era imac but some shitty old computer because her family is poor, your average people didn't have Apple stuff in 2002 like they do today.
And Ladybird doesn't dress like a stereotypical teen of the era, the walls of her room aren't littered with posters of popular bands at the time, it all feels more real, like you're really looking back at the early 2000s, not a commercial idea of it.
And I was VERY impressed with how the movie handled the fact that it was the post 9/11 era and the start of the Iraq war, none of that has anything directly to do with the story of the movie, but it would feel dishonest to make a movie about that time period and not in some way address what was going on, to just ignore it, but Ladybird does it in a very clever and subtle way, at the start of the movie you see her class commemorating the 1 year anniversary of 9/11 and there's a couple of scenes where she's watching news about the Iraq war on TV, before turning it off and going about her teenage life.
And that right there was really kind of mind blowing because that's how it was for me, you'd see stuff about it on TV, but quickly just kinda shrug it off and focus on your life, those scenes really capture what life was like back then.
But beyond the period setting it was simply a good movie, I don't care that it was a woman who directed it, it was a good movie.
