Kicking and Screaming · reception & legacy

1995 · Noah Baumbach

How Kicking and Screaming has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Barely a blip on release in 1995 — a small indie that came and went — it got fully reappraised once The Squid and the Whale made Baumbach a name, culminating in a Criterion edition in 2006 and its current status as a beloved debut.

What's debated

The perennial fight is whether its hyper-articulate post-grads are charming or insufferable — and whether this looser, warmer Baumbach is actually preferable to his sharper later work.

Its footprint

It's the ur-text of post-college malaise, endlessly quoted for lines like 'I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday' — and it lives a second life as the punchline 'no, not the Will Ferrell soccer one,' thanks to the 2005 movie that took its title.

Where it stands

A Criterion-blessed cult favourite and a Letterboxd staple — the hangout movie people press on friends the week after graduation.

★ Did you know? Baumbach wrote and directed it in his mid-twenties, just a few years out of Vassar — and a decade later it became one of the relatively few 1990s American indies to receive a Criterion Collection release (2006).