Kicking and Screaming
- intimate
Neutral, steady, gentle comedy / drama, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →After college graduation, Grover's girlfriend Jane tells him she's moving to Prague to study writing. Grover declines to accompany her, deciding instead to move in with several friends, all of whom can't quite work up the inertia to escape their university's pull. Nobody wants to make any big decisions that would radically alter his life, yet none of them wants to end up like Chet, the professional student who tends bar and is in his tenth year of university studies.
Our read · Kicking and Screaming (1995) reads as a neutral, steady, grounded comedy · drama entry — gentle in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook, with a strong directorial signature. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
Availability in the UK · via JustWatch
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The shape of Kicking and Screaming
What watching it is actually like.
“You want witty nineties post-grad stasis, video-store banter, and quarter-life drift.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if aimless talky slackers and unresolved endings feel too close to real life.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself