Metacritic reviews

It feels like real life unfolding before your eyes.

Despite its shock value, Thirteen rises above dysfunctional-family-drama cliches, thanks to the truthfulness of its script and the keen eye of a sympathetic director.

A smart movie that does not simplify or candy-coat the rigors of the teenage years.

Wood is superb at delineating Tracy's slide into desperate incoherence, but equally impressive is Reed, who has to conceal her writer's intelligence in playing a character who's entirely instinctive and unreflective.

Would it be rude to suggest that your time might be better spent with your own children?

Thirteen has a way of smashing through your defenses. Hardwicke has goosed up the old melodramatic formula with a neorealist syntax and up-to-the-minute cultural nuances and violence.

Isn't in league with the Nicholas Ray classic ("Rebel Without a Cause"), but in its ferocious energy and lead performances it's many cuts above most big-screen soap operas.

Deliberately unvarnished shock piece designed to give pause to anyone with a daughter approaching teenhood.

Though thirteen too often mistakes hard realism for overheated spectacle, the heightened drama brings out the best in Wood and Hunter, who turn their climactic scene into an actors' workshop, charged with raw emotion. As the film barrels toward the outrageously histrionic, they nearly pull it back from the brink.

If you boil Thirteen down to its flimsy bones, you'll find that it's not really so much about peer pressure in contemporary teen life as it is a story about a classic bad egg. That right there dilutes its highfalutin aspirations.