A Girl Like Grace (2015)

Best movie of this year hands down!

That was an excellent one.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This is a coming of age story for Grace (Ryan Destiny) raised by a single Haitian mother (Garcelle Beauvais) with outward beauty, but dubious morals. Grace is smart and doesn't want to be like her mother, yet is drawn down the same path. Grace turns inward after her best friend (Paige Hurd) kills herself, the circumstances we get to know in flashbacks. Grace is coaxed out of her shell with many negative results, much of her own doing. Meagan Good plays Grace's new BFF and mentor for better and worse.This is a well acted film, although I thought parts were over done. It touches on bulling and finding your true self.Guide: F-word, sex, and rape.

It's OK. I liked the way it was filmed and it had a lot of promise, but it feels like the movie was edited for time and kind of skipped around leaving out important details. I wouldn't even call this a coming of age tale. I would call it more a chic turning a 360, random tale. One scene she loses her virginity and likes this guy and literally the next evening she's out hitting on other men at the club with no explanation on why she dropped the other guy. Then when she gets raped and her and Cher show back up, she doesn't shoot the dudes or do anything. She just runs away and lets her friend take the fall. At the end of the movie you almost no longer feel sorry for her, but instead start to resent her.

I really liked this movie, but wish the characters backgrounds could have been developed more. There were lots of flashbacks to the past, but without any real explanations or specific details of what happened. All the characters are flawed, as all human beings are, and there is a lot of tragedy shaping the main characters. Ryan Destiny is a great actress who portrays Grace, a troubled teenager who is coming of age after losing her best friend to suicide the summer before her senior year of high school. I enjoyed her relationship with Meagan Good's Share (Grace's best friend's older sister) although Share's character is somewhat confusing. The ending is confusing too...leaving questions about Share's future fate unanswered. Motivations were unclear at times. Excellent story and interesting characters, but individual personalities could have been explored in much more depth than they were. Still, I was emotionally vested in the characters' pain, & cried at the end of the movie

I rate movies based on their ability to leave me with new questions. I left wanting to understand more about the mother (played by Garcelle Beauvais) - to deconstruct her if you will - from the fear she had about her daughter's sexual identity (what exactly was her underlying fear? why wasn't she more afraid of the fate her daughter would meet at the hands of sexual predators and/or men who might otherwise exploit her?); to the lack of what I'd like to call a maternal muscle; and, to her own inherited broken cycles of what love looks and feels like. I wanted to know more about how class and culture affected her capacity to render the kind of nurture and compassion that her daughter (played by Ryan Destiny) so desperately needed. Ultimately, this was a movie about identity and beauty; how we see ourselves and the way we think the rest of the world sees us and/or the ones we love is absolutely critical to who we ultimately become.