Film

Margaret

Name: Margaret
Genre: Drama
Released: 2011
Cast: Anna Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, Mark Ruffalo, Jeannie Berlin, Jean Reno

Coming-of-age
Very dark

A seventeen-year-old's certainty that she caused a fatal accident spirals into a bruising confrontation with guilt, responsibility, and moral absolutes. Kenneth Lonergan's unflinching portrait of teenage rage and adult compromise unfolds across two and a half hours of raw emotional friction. It's for viewers willing to sit with discomfort and recognize themselves in someone unsympathetic.

TMDb rating

3.2

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love sprawling, talky New York dramas where moral arguments unspool in overlapping voices and a messy teenager's fury feels more right than wrong.

Skip it if you want a tight two-hour movie, since this one runs 150 minutes and lets scenes sprawl well past the point where they seem to have finished.

What it asks of you: Settle in for two and a half hours of crowded dialogue, people arguing past each other, and a heroine rarely easy to be around.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Boyhood2014

A twelve-year chronicle of growing up that captures the specific weight of youthful conviction colliding with time's indifference. Lonergan-adjacent in its patient, unglamorous attention to how people become who they are.

But The novelty of the real-time production can overshadow the storytelling. At three hours-plus, it moves at a pace that rewards patience but punishes restlessness.

Manchester by the Sea2016

Lonergan's own follow-up, trading teenage fury for adult grief. Mark Ruffalo's understated devastation and the film's refusal to resolve anything neatly—it simply sits with loss and moves forward anyway.

But The emotional density is exhausting. It's a film about people who cannot say what they mean, which means you spend two hours reading silences.

Moonlight2016

Three chapters of a life shaped by impossible circumstances. The protagonist's rage and self-protection mirror Lisa's fury, but the film's visual poetry and structural grace offer a kind of beauty Margaret deliberately withholds.

But Its dreamlike languor and fragmented narrative require active attention. Some find it remote; others find that distance is the point.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Margaret

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Nil by Mouth1997

Both follow young people trapped in the gap between moral clarity and adult compromise, watching their ideals get mangled by people who should love them.

Gary Oldman's only directorial effort is a punishing, luminous portrait of family violence—how it cycles, how it traps, how people within it tell themselves stories to survive. Unflinching in a way that feels almost documentary. Lisa's rage is self-directed; here, it's inherited and weaponized.

But It's a film in which characters debase themselves repeatedly and nothing redeems them. Shot in grainy, claustrophobic video, it looks and feels like being trapped in someone's worst moments. Some call it essential; others find it punitive to watch.

The Farewell2019

A young woman at odds with her family's emotional logic and practical compromises. Funny and devastating by turns, it captures that specific blindness of youth to what love might require.

But The tonal shifts between comedy and heartbreak can feel abrupt if you're braced for one mood. It refuses to stay still.

Eighth Grade2018

Bo Burnham's debut documents a thirteen-year-old's interior life with excruciating specificity—her shame, her hunger for connection, her absolute conviction in things she'll soon abandon. The mortification is real.

But Secondhand embarrassment is the entire point. If you can't watch characters humiliate themselves without flinching, you won't make it through.

The Sopranos1999

Tony's family suffers his rages and contradictions across eight seasons. The show understands that people hurt those closest to them, and doesn't forgive them for it—just keeps going.

But It's a commit-to-all-six-seasons project, and the violence is graphic. The pace in early episodes reflects 1999 network television, which can feel slow now.

Krisha2016

Ari Aster's semi-autobiographical debut about a young man wrestling with addiction, family, and the unbridgeable gap between wanting to change and actually doing it. Harsh and intimate.

But Shot on a micro-budget in long, static takes. The naturalism can read as slow, and the family dysfunction has no arc—it's just cyclical and real.

Ladybird Ladybird1994

Greta Gerwig's portrait of a girl at war with her mother, her hometown, and her own impossible standards. It understands teenage certainty and the small cruelties that come with it.

But The resolution is soft and earned rather than cathartic. If you want the teenager to learn her lesson, you'll be disappointed.

You Can Count on Me2000

Two siblings navigate adulthood, family obligation, and the person the other has become. Quiet and precise, it shows how love and resentment can occupy the same moment.

But The emotional beats are subdued. It's a character study that prizes nuance over drama, which can feel slight if you want larger gestures.

A Ghost Story2017

Both are about people unable to move past a moment of perceived responsibility, and both suggest that the obsession itself is the real wound.

An experimental meditation on guilt, responsibility, and whether we can ever know what damage we've caused. Formally strange—a ghost literally haunts, but the film's real subject is how we're haunted by our own failures and the indifference of time.

But It's deliberately slow and conceptual, with minimal dialogue. Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck are largely obscured. If you want plot, you will be frustrated.

Detour1945

Both collapse the distance between one moment and a life derailed. In Margaret, the moment is a traffic accident; here, a woman encountered at the wrong time. Both ask: how much are we responsible for what we cannot control?

A eight-minute 1945 noir so perfectly constructed it feels inevitable. A man tells a story of how one wrong choice cascaded into disaster—not through villainy, but through circumstance and bad luck. Centuries of film theory exist in this tiny, perfect machine.

But It's from 1945, so the gender politics and moral framework are period-specific. Seventy-eight years of storytelling has moved past it, though the form it perfected lives on.