All posts tagged: Girls State

Apple TV+’s Follow-Up to ‘Boys State’ Doc

Apple TV+’s Follow-Up to ‘Boys State’ Doc

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Boys State, a winner at Sundance in 2020 and the Emmys in 2021, walked a delicate line between delivering an inspiring and wholly disheartening look at the civic-minded teens attending Texas’ version of the annual governmental jamboree.  Since that ideological conflict aligned perfectly with my own experiences at Massachusetts Boys State a million years ago, I felt Boys State pretty deeply, while recognizing that it raced through its character portraits with more haste than its heroes (and juvenile villains) might have deserved. Girls State The Bottom Line An uneven but still crowdpleasing successor. Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)Directors: Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss 1 hour 34 minutes The haste is even more evident in Moss and McBaine’s wholly logical follow-up, Girls State, which brings an identical formula to a patriotic ritual that’s exactly like Boys State — except for all of the ways it proves to be different over 94 minutes.  Girls State, like its predecessor, benefits from strong casting and ample access to the pint-sized political proceedings. And, like …