There's a New 'Must-See' Cult Classic

The man who brought you Boyhood, Slacker, and Dazed and Confused might have another gem on his hands. Critics are in love with Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!!, giving it a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what they're saying:

• The film follows university baseball jocks for a weekend in 1980. It has "a swagger that instead of being irritating becomes irresistible," writes Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. "It'll slap on a smile on your face that won't quit." Blake Jenner, Wyatt Russell, and Zoey Deutch are all terrific and provide "raucous" laughs, he says.
• "It's frequently hilarious and unusually gripping for a film that strives to avoid manufactured drama. … It wins you over without ever seeming to try," writes David Sims at the Atlantic. "In short, it's an effortless cult classic, delivered by a master of the form, and one of the first truly must-see movies of 2016." Sims particularly likes Linklater's "take on dudehood," which avoids "one-dimensional stereotypes."

• Rene Rodriguez agrees the flick "will have a cult following that thrives long after it has fallen out of the weekly Top 10 box office race." It's "the rare sort of raunchy American comedy that allows as much time for scenes of people simply talking as it does for mud-wrestling matches and bar brawls," Rodriguez writes at the Miami Herald. There's not much of a plot, but "the mood is loose and easygoing, and the dialogue flows because Linklater loves words."
• Linklater works "with the grace of a surreptitious curveball and the ease of a perfect pop song," writes Stephanie Zacharek at Time. The result is "a seemingly straightforward picture that's surprisingly stealthy in capturing the joy and exaltation of being an almost-adult." She argues the entire cast of mostly newbie actors is "winning," but Jenner and Glen Powell "are the real standouts." The soundtrack is awesome, to boot.

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