Coming-of-age stories are my favorite. Whenever I'm feeling uncertain about my future, I always turn to them to make me feel hopeful again. I get reminded that many other people have gone through my problems before, and I'm capable of overcoming them. Here are some of my favorite coming-of-age movies, I hope they can brighten your day!

Bridge to Terabithia

Jess (Hutcherson) is an attention-starved ten-year-old misfit. His schoolmates treat him as though he gets dipped in a cesspit before registration each morning and his parents (Patrick, Butler) are too busy trying to make ends meet to notice that he's a talented artist. His life is changed when he is befriended by the pretty, slightly eccentric girl (Robb) who moves in next door. Together they ransack their imaginations to create their own private magic kingdom — the titular Teribithia - in which they rule as King and Queen.

Bridge To Terabithia's scope is surprisingly broad for a family film: it deals with identity, family, the nature of courage, the difficulty of being an outsider and even God. But its main thrust is friendship. The burgeoning bond between the brooding, emotionally stunted Jess and the insightful, gleefully odd Lesley is handled beautifully, which makes the tragic twist at the end more impactful.

Whisper of the Heart

Director Yoshifumi Kondō and screenwriter Hayao Miyazaki follow 14-year-old Shizuku Tsukishima (Yōko Honna). There is no greater fantastical importance (like a “chosen one” narrative) demanding the chronicling of her existence. Tsukishima is an ordinary person, albeit one headlining an extraordinary movie.

Growing up means realizing how inescapable failure and vulnerability are. These two qualities don’t vanish the moment you graduate high school. They follow you like a storm cloud, always making you question whether or not there’s a “beautiful crystal” inside your being. Such a moment wouldn’t work nearly as well if Yoshifumi Kondō didn’t wield a deft command of naturalistically getting audiences invested in Tsukishima, Nishi, and everyone else in Whisper of the Heart’s world. Kondō’s sole directorial effort is a masterpiece uncovering so much potent pathos from understated corners of life.

Lady Bird

Lady Bird is a love story, but not the type of love story that most likely comes to mind when you hear that phrase. It is not about Lady Bird falling in love with a boy (although she does). This movie is about the love between a mother and a daughter, and how to preserve that love during the teenage years when they don’t like each other.

Lady Bird’s life is full of the kinds of mistakes that just about every young woman will make and remember forever. Moments like crying in the car to Dave Matthews Band songs after a break-up, the pure joy of a first kiss, the feeling that everything that happens is the end of the world when it’s really just the beginning. Gerwig’s debut is one that will always be relevant, no matter the year. Music will change, fashion will change, but the feelings that Gerwig captures will be forever.

Good Will Hunting

Will Hunting—as everyone must know by now—is a working-class genius, and Good Will Hunting is the story of how this janitor-cum-Southie prodigy is saved from a life of grunt work when he casually decodes an “unsolvable” proof on a hallway chalkboard at MIT. The man who put the proof up is Professor Gerald Lambeau, who gets Will out of an assault charge by putting him to work in the math department and putting him into therapy. It turns out the only therapist who can handle him is Lambeau’s old friend Sean.

That’s all of a piece with the emotional urgency of Good Will Hunting, a film in which a young person’s future genuinely matters, to many, many people. It’s a movie that captures – in a way that perhaps an older, jaded screenwriter could not convey – the limitless possibilities of youth, a movie in which a character can tell another, without cynicism, “You could do anything you want. You are bound by nothing.”