Run time: 106 mins

For nearly 50 years, legendary YA author Judy Blume was reluctant to surrender the rights to her 1970 classic Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret.

But that all changed in 2018, when writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) approached the author with a pitch. Blume was won over, and we’re are now blessed with an adaptation.

The film focuses on 11-year-old Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson), who is uprooted from her life in New York City for the suburbs of New Jersey, going through the messy and tumultuous throes of puberty with new friends in a new school. She relies on her mother, Barbara (Rachel McAdams), who is also struggling to adjust to life outside the big city, and her free-wheeling, judgement-spouting grandmother, Sylvia (Kathy Bates), who isn’t happy they moved away and likes to remind them every chance she gets.

Long revered as a coming-of-age classic, the book’s highly personal themes led it to be often censored by school libraries and parent organisations, which only made Craig want to adapt the story more. And thank god she did, this is brilliant stuff.