Publication Date: 12-15-2025

Flipped (2010) review

Dir. Rob Reiner

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★★

Remembering Rob Reiner

1947 – 2025

Flipped is a coming of age film directed by the coming of age master director Rob Reiner. Reiner directed the tear-jerker Stand By Me and is now back to bring Wendelin Van Draanen’s novel of the same name to life. What a treat! Flipped and Stand By Me both make me wish my childhood was full of more adventure and fun rather than just me sitting on the computer writing review after review aspiring to be a critic. I get tears in my eyes to both films because I become so attached to the characters and they’re living the life I can only dream to have. With the exception of unfaithful parents when it comes to Stand By Me.

What came to mind halfway through the film was why couldn’t the movie Speak have been this good? This film proves more than 80% can be done by narration from two characters’ different perspective and it can be done well. Why not do the same for Speak? Most of the dialog in this film is internal and not directly word of mouth and it works. Why not treat Speak the same way? Were they afraid they would mess it up? It begs an explanation to why Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel’s potential on film was unfaithful to it’s film companion.

Never reading the book, I do know that it was set in the nineties and the two thousands while this film’s setting is in the late fifties and early sixties. It’s not that big of a deal with the drastic setting change, but maybe I would’ve been more upset if I was a huge fan of the book to find out the film was set four years in the past.

The movie is about Bryce Loski (Calin McAuliffe), a kid who moves into the neighborhood at a young age to immediately become eye candy to his new neighbor Juli Baker (Madeline Carroll). Bryce is resistant, while Juli is persistent. She is positive Bryce will give her her first kiss and believes Bryce is just a little shy, when really he wants nothing to do with her. Juli continues up until present day middle school to give Bryce the chance to admit his “feelings” for her but doesn’t.

Juli lives across the street from Bryce and her yard is an eyesore. It’s paid for by the landlord since most of the money Juli and her family makes is given to Juli’s father’s mentally challenged brother. Bryce’s family, his dad mostly, is annoyed by Juli and her family’s crappy yard and continue to bad mouth and make assumptions about the Baker family when they really have no idea what it’s like over there.

The film is narrated by both leads more often than not. Usually we’ll get five minutes or so of Bryce narrating his side of the story, while Juli narrates her’s. It’s almost an anthology because we see what goes on from Bryce’s standpoint while hearing his thoughts at the moment and then we see what happened prior or after the events of Bryce’s because we then go to Juli. It’s confusing. But it works all the time.

At the beginning of the film I thought the narrations were only used for the audience to get affiliated with the lives of the characters and what happened before we got here. We spend ninety minutes or longer with movie characters and some films don’t even give you the damn courtesy to provide us with any kind of background information. We are supposed to just be thrown into a film with characters we sometimes don’t even find out the last names to.

Flipped is an underrated delight; a shockingly mature and poignant coming-of-age film. It’s smooth style of directing, great music, calm feeling even at it’s most stressful, and strong leads are more than I could’ve asked for. Rob Reiner is something else. A true talent in the movie business. Especially when making a movie as heartfelt as this one.

Starring: Callan McAuliffe, Madeline Carroll, Rebecca De Mornay, Anthony Edwards, John Mahoney, Penelope Ann Miller, Aidan Quinn, and Kevin Weisman. Directed by: Rob Reiner.