Lady Bird ★★★★ 

If you liked last year’s highly praised The Edge of Seventeen, a delicate comedic drama about high school life for an awkward teen girl, you’ll love the similarly themed, yet even more perceptive coming-of-age tale, Lady Bird. The stunning, semi-autobiographical writing/directing debut of Greta Gerwig—a wonderfully idiosyncratic actress who penned the strong screenplays for 2012’s Frances Ha and 2015’s Mistress America, a pair of films she also starred in for her partner of six years, director Noah Baumbach—is easily one of the year’s best films. One of the better directorial decisions she made was to retain those movies’ cinematographer, Sam Levy, but her best decision of all: Hiring two-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan (the 23-year-old star of Brooklyn) to portray Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson. Like Gerwig, Lady Bird was 17 in 2002, and living in Sacramento, “the Midwest of California,” while not-so-secretly dreaming of moving to New York. Christine’s also fond of claiming she lives on “the wrong side of the tracks,” which sets up one of the film’s many big laughs, including when her first boyfriend (Lucas Hedges, an Oscar nominee for last year’s Manchester by the Sea) meets her mother (Laurie Metcalf from TV’s Roseanne, in her best role in years) and observes that “I always thought that was, like, a metaphor, but there are actual train tracks.” Bittersweet and truthful, this is one to see with your mom at Boston Common, Coolidge Corner and Kendall Square.