A tender Sundance standout captures the messy ache of adolescence and the uneasy thrill of trying to grow up too fast.
This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.
For adults who’ve conveniently blocked out memories of their own teenage angst, director Paloma Schneideman’s Big Girls Don’t Cry may bring all those feelings roaring back—but it’ll also urge you to have a little empathy for the younger version of yourself.
A New Zealand entry in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic competition, the film is a sensitive, insightful portrayal of how teenagers struggle to sort out their own mixed motivations while shuttling constantly between big adult feelings and childlike urges.
A discrete slice-of-life limited to one 2006 summer break—the same year the eponymous Fergie song came out—in the life of 14-year-old Sid (Ani Palmer), Big Girls Don’t Cry finds its tomboy protagonist living with a caring-but-checked-out dad (Noah Taylor) and dealing with conflicting feelings as her older sister, Adele (Tara Canton), returns from university with an American friend in tow: the intriguingly free-spirited Freya (Rain Spencer).
Sid also has to figure out the changing dynamics of her relationship with best friend Tia (Ngataitangirua Hita), whose brother’s chat history offers Sid a tempting opportunity to interact clandestinely with older girls who both repel and attract her.
Questioning her sexuality, experimenting online in familiarly daft teenage ways, and bored with rural life, Sid quickly abandons her typical summer break activities of bike-riding and lounging with Tia to hang out with a bevy of fickle older girls. Ingratiating herself to the group by providing them with alcohol she’s stolen from her father, Sid vacillates between recognizing her position as an outsider and trying to shoehorn herself into the cool crowd.
… Sid wanders through her days outwardly unhurried but also rushing to achieve some version of ‘grown up’ she doesn’t fully grasp.
One night, Sid trails her older “friends” to meet up with a pack of boys whose jocular behavior she only marginally understands. Another night, she ends up at a party full of older teens, including Freya and Adele, who blasts her kid sister for following them around.
Adele tries to manage her sister’s behavior, but out of annoyance rather than concern, ultimately leaving disciplining to their father, who has bigger fish to fry and no patience for micromanaging Sid’s time.
Freya somewhat takes Sid under her wing, but she’s just a young adult herself and, it turns out, not that much better than Sid when it comes to the foibles of youth.
Sid makes a slew of questionable choices throughout the film: behaving recklessly, making spur-of-the-moment or purely self-serving decisions, lying about her sexual experiences, and trying to work out her attraction to some of the older girls that surround her. Just like the summer that sprawls out before her, Sid wanders through her days outwardly unhurried but also rushing to achieve some version of “grown up” she doesn’t fully grasp. She tries to take stock of who she is, and yet still shows little self-awareness, a tension that rings true for a character who may not always be likable but for whom viewers will likely have deep empathy.
While Big Girls Don’t Cry eschews any obvious closure—the film ends when summer does, regardless of where that leaves Sid—it has its own rewards in the way it speaks to the transformative potential of growing agency. While Sid’s decisions aren’t always the “right” ones, what’s heartening is the way the film allows her to wallow in the ambivalence that comes from trying to learn from your mistakes while constantly making new ones.
