Movies to watch after graduation

Gabby Tjiroze
Tiny Furniture

Lena Dunham gets what it is to be a millennial woman. Before she began perfectly portraying early twenties life in Girls, she wrote, directed, and starred in Tiny Furniture, a movie about recent grad Aura’s first months out of college. “I’m in a post-graduate delirium,” Aura says as she moves back in with her successful artist mother and overachieving younger sister. Aura reconnects with childhood friends, gets a job as a hostess (that she ultimately quits, justifying giving up by saying,

Post Grad

From her years as Rory Gilmore, to her time on Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Alexis Bledel has been there for us every step of the way (she even made a few thoroughly grown-up appearances on Mad Men). In Post Grad, she plays recent graduate Ryden, a girl who has always had a life plan. Good grades in high school, a college scholarship, and a great GPA in college were all supposed to lead to getting a job at a top publishing company in L.A. As you can imagine, things don’t quite go as planned.

The Graduate

As millennial women, we may not have much in common with Ben Braddock (a very young Dustin Hoffman), but The Graduate is perhaps the best known movie about a recent college grad. This classic is a good one to have in your film arsenal and what better time to watch than as a recent graduate yourself? While Ben is a young man struggling with an illicit affair in the 1960s, the insecurities and sentiments he expresses about having just graduated still resonate today. At one point Mrs. Robinson asks Ben if he’s upset, and his response perfectly sums up how many of us feel: “I’m just a little worried about my future. I’m a little upset about my future.”

Accepted

Accepted is a 2006 American comedy film directed by Steve Pink and written by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage and Mark Perez. The plot follows a group of high school graduates who create their own fake college after being rejected from the colleges to which they applied. The story takes place in Wickliffe and a fictitious college town called Harmon in Ohio. Filming took place in Los Angeles and Orange in California at Chapman University. This film was later remade in Bollywood as F.A.L.T.U starring Jackky Bhagnani.

Adventureland

Adventureland is a 2009 American romantic comedy film written and directed by Greg Mottola, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart and co-starring Ryan Reynolds, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Martin Starr, and Margarita Levieva. The film is set in the summer of 1987 when recent college grad James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is making big plans to tour Europe and attend graduate school in pursuit of a career in journalism. However, financial problems force him to look for a summer job instead of traveling abroad, which places him at Adventureland, a run-down amusement park in western Pennsylvania.

Into the Wild

Into the Wild is a 2007 American biographical survival film written, co-produced, and directed by Sean Penn. It is an adaptation of Jon Krakauer's 1996 nonfiction book of the same name, based on the travels of Christopher McCandless across North America and his experiences in the Alaskan wilderness in the early 1990s. The film stars Emile Hirsch as McCandless, and Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt as his parents, and features Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Kristen Stewart, and Hal Holbrook.

Mona Lisa Smile

Mona Lisa Smile is a 2003 American drama film produced by Revolution Studios and Columbia Pictures in association with Red Om Films Productions, directed by Mike Newell, written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, and starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal. The title is a reference to the Mona Lisa, the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and the song of the same name, originally performed by Nat King Cole, which was covered by Seal for the movie. Julia Roberts received a record $25 million for her performance, the highest ever earned by an actress at that time.[3]