Bottoms

This second collaboration between Shiva Baby director Emma Seligman and star Rachel Sennott manages to be both a trope-filled high-school movie and a hilariously savage satire of the genre. Sennott and Ayo Edebiri star as PJ and Josie, lesbian outcasts who spend their days obsessing over cheerleaders who barely know they exist. Following a bizarre incident involving the star football player (Nicholas Galitzine), false rumours swirl about the girls, and in the hope of attracting their respective crushes, they play up their new bad-girl image, launching an all-female self-defence fight club. There are some silly plot points, but the film is raucously funny thanks to its sheer absurdity, and Sennott and Edebiri are deadpan excellence personified. Co-written by Seligman and Sennott, Bottoms is delightfully audacious in the way that it takes aim at the normalisation of misogyny and homophobia in high-school culture. With fight-club members delivering some gleefully dark jokes, this is a teen comedy with a difference.