A big festival hit but otherwise a brash indie too grim and severe to really break out in theaters, Antonio Campos’s Afterschool is one of the best movies ever made about high school — that is, it nails the experience to the wall with a gutter spike. I’m not talking about the fun but fantastical high school movies you’re thinking of, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High , but the movies that capture the lostness, the social combat, and the pubertal angst, movies like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant , Lindsay Anderson’s If… , Shunji Iwai’s All about Lily Chou-Chou , and Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge . (I’d throw in Park Ki-hyeong’s moody K-horror epic Ghost School Trilogy and Frederick Wiseman’s High School , but maybe that’s enough adolescent hallway dread already.)
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On DVD: The Best High School Movie You Haven’t Seen
