When Lady Bird came out in 2017, I could not believe that a full fifteen years had passed since 2002, the year in which Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age chronicle was set—back when grocery stores still had cashiers, glossy magazines still produced print issues, all the cool kids smoked cloves and dial-up internet reigned supreme.
Nearly a decade (and, for this writer, one twenty-year high school reunion) later, a new wave of films approaching the ’00s as a period setting, many directed by women reflecting on their own formative years, has arrived in earnest. As one such entry in this emerging subgenre—Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s festival favorite Mouse—hits theaters, it’s the perfect time to explore recent coming-of-age films exemplifying this trend.
Some filmmakers have recently looked back at the turn of the millennium to critique the aughts’ troubling sociopolitical dimensions, from the War on Terror and post-9/11 jingoism to the impact of the Great Recession (here, a wider sampling of these films). But the most prevalent use of this era as a period setting thus far has been as a lens through which to explore the waning days of analog teenagedom.