Thirteen

Prolific production designer and art director Catherine Hardwicke makes her directorial debut with the coming-of-age drama Thirteen. Los Angeles teenager and overachiever Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) is an excellent student in her seventh grade class and gets along well with her mother, Melanie (Holly ...more

For most Americans, adolescence is a jungle difficult to navigate, much less survive. The team of director Catherine Hardwicke and co-writer Nikki Reed, who also stars as pretty, popular bad girl Evie Zamora, understands this all too well. In Thirteen, the creative tandem takes a hard, unjaundiced look at growing pains which mar the experience of growing up. Thirteen-year-old Tracy—a revelatory Evan Rachel Wood—starts out as a good, poetry-writing kid. She quickly devolves into a nasty, ...more

The reassuring thing about Thirteen is that it's not another Kids-style exploitation piece with naked teenagers running around in their underwear under the pretense of realism. Instead it ends up being a one-dimensional cautionary tale told in an after-school special kind of way, like a super intense episode of Degrassi Junior High. Partly written by teenage co-star Nikki Reed and filmed with a constantly moving handheld camera, the story spins out of control just like its skinny blonde ...more