Beautiful Girls, the best film directed by the late Ted Demme, has always been on my list of underappreciated favorites. Released in 1996, it concerned an impromptu reunion of a group of high-school pals in a tiny Massachusetts town, one snowy February.

Well-acted by a cast that includes Tim Hutton, Matt Dillon, Michael Rapaport, Cameron Diaz and a young and luminescent Natalie Portman, Demme’s comic drama is witty and irreverent and captures — in a heightened reality way — what guys of a certain generation sound like when they get together.

The smart screenplay was penned by Scott Rosenberg, who went on to write High Fidelity before hitting a career low with Kangaroo Jack.

Ted Boynton, in a funny and insightful essay posted on the snarky pop culture site Pajiba, really nails the appeal of the film.

“Chief among the film’s virtues is its capturing of How Guys Talk, and Beautiful Girls begins and ends with the keenly self-conscious relationship among four high school friends who have outgrown their adolescent trappings without leaving them completely behind, like gangly ten-month Lab pups whose oversized paws are like snowshoes on their gawky bodies,” Boynton writes.

Click here to read the rest.