In many ways, it’s comforting and exciting that Life Partners exists: a genuinely funny comedy about two female friends that doesn’t involve a wedding or fighting over guys. Plus, it’s a smorgasbord of incredible talent, with Community’s Gillian Jacobs and Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester possessing a stranglehold on the two leads, playing codependent besties with crackling comedic chemistry.

Sasha (Meester’s stuck in neutral character) is a lesbian, who brings Paige (Jacobs) to gay pride festivals and lesbian bars, joined by the insane Jen(n)’s: Jen (American Horror Story’s Gabourey Sidibe) and Jenn (Burning Love’s Beth Dover). Life Partners exists in a world where all anyone talks about is their singlehood. Paige and Sasha are obviously single, and painfully so. They watch America’s Next Top Model incessantly and have pink wine induced sleepovers at each other’s houses, knowing what pillow the other favors when they share a bed. Paige is an environmental lawyer, whereas Sasha languishes at a receptionist job, with an increasingly wavering eye toward a musical career that she doesn’t work toward.

Unfortunately, a guy is what comes between them, when a late night Tinder sesh turns into a long-term relationship with Tim (an always adorable Adam Brody) for Paige. Sasha’s Tinder date ended up being a disastrous drink with a “baritone” woman who works for To Catch a Predator (memorably played by SNL alum Kate McKinnon). At times, the film almost veers into the romantic comedy territory that it’s so desperately trying to avoid, as Paige and Sasha snipe about one other’s love life. There are moments where I wonder if this movie even passes the Bechdel test (assuming that in this case when one of the two women is a lesbian, talking about a woman is equivalent to talking about a man so long as it’s under a romantic subtext), but of course it does. Luckily, it’s not really about the guy (and it helps that Adam Brody is impossible to dislike), it’s about how the change in Paige’s relationship status warps their friendship, and showcases the ugly side of what happens when friends grow drift apart. It’s a universal story, one in which their profound differences that have been smoothed over or ignored because of their codependency and lack of having anyone else, come barreling out with pent up vigor when circumstances change.

Life Partners is a buddy romantic comedy with two X chromosomes, a bramance instead of a bromance (sorry). And it feels so realistic: writer-director Susanna Fogel (Chasing Life) has imbued the film with realism, a ton of awkward humor that boils into vitriolic conflict between Paige, Sasha, Tim and the Jen’s. In many ways, none of these characters are likable. Paige is stuck up, texts while drives, doesn’t admit she’s wrong to a cringe-worthy extent and is super judgy. Sasha routinely hooks up with young girls who live with their parents, and is one of those people who complains about her job and life incessantly instead of doing something about it. Jenn is probably a serial killer. These are the kind of characters (and people) we see all the time, but they’re normally played by men, and we’re supposed to like them (and oftentimes don’t). Whereas I find myself openly wondering who actually thinks most of the stock characters in studio comedies are funny, Paige and Sasha openly admit that they’re the only two people in the world that think they’re funny. Fogel doesn’t care if we like Paige or Sasha, and that’s exactly why we like them. They seem stolen from our social life. They are our social life, whether you’re a man, woman or lesbian, and that’s the point.

Leighton Meester, in particular, is a revelation to me (we know Jacobs can play a funny but grating character, though we’ve never been blessed/cursed with such a large dose). I’ve never seen Gossip Girl, but Meester’s persona give you certain expectations: that Meester was constructed in a lab as another sexy multi-hyphenate who can be safely recycled through various tenets of pop culture. She dashes them, playing off her music career for laughs, and being genuinely hilarious and hilariously genuine in turn, while always being relatable, thanks to her blatant vulnerability. She’s almost exclusively the best part of every scene she’s in, and that includes bouncing off another SNL veteran in Abby Elliott and a slew of other great performers.

Life Partners is a painfully accurate film; it’s one we’ve seen several times before, but never quite like this, thanks to such a talented and diverse female cast, making it worth a look.

Life Partners is On Demand and iTunes now, and arrives in theaters December 5^th, 2014.

On the surface, White Bird in a Blizzard is another book turned into a movie that stars Shailene Woodley, the go-to young actress to adapt the lives of several tortured teenagers on paper to the big screen. But, it doesn’t take long to realize Gregg Araki’s film is different.

Somehow (because Hollywood), Shailene Woodley became a young, up and coming actress to someone I was tired of just three years after her breakout role in The Descendants. She’s the star of Divergent, Fault of Our Stars, The Spectacular Now and was Mary Jane Watson in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, yet somehow I still don’t know what I think about her as an actress.

Oftentimes Hollywood crowns its stars too easily or prematurely, or force feeds us actors until their career demands an E! True Hollywood Story. After watching White Bird in a Blizzard with absolutely no preconceived notions (I had never read the book by Laura Kasischke; I didn’t even remember who was in it beyond Woodley), I’m finally ready to embrace the idea of Shailene Woodley, movie star.

As Kat Connor, a freshly boobed high schooler who isn’t getting enough from her stoner boyfriend Phil (Evil Dead’s Shiloh Fernandez), and only enjoys herself when she’s complaining about others, Shailene Woodley is as real, genuine and unlikable as a 17 year old who discovers that her repressed mother just up and disappeared from her life, maybe forever. To many of us, such a moment would be devastating. Instead, Kat just can’t wait to move on and seduce the sexy cop assigned to her Mom’s missing persons case, Detective Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane, meet perfect casting). It was easy, she says to her friends in the mall or the record store or the basement in the small town that never changes, and we start to believe her.

This movie truly plays off the fact that a sex-obsessed adolescent is a wholly unreliable narrator. Kat is as self-absorbed, ignorant, and bored with her life as we all were in high school, and that’s why she’s so blind to what’s been in plain sight all this time. It’s what helps make White Bird in a Blizzard so surprising, so disturbing and so effective.

As I’ve already harped on, the casting in this movie is brilliant. Just imagine Eva Green as a misanthropic housewife, someone who would be jealous of her daughter’s looks, because she’s getting old. This is a woman whose boobs were too hot for a Sin City 2 poster, and that’s precisely why it works so well. Eva Green embodies Eve Connor, the miracle homemaker turned miserable, listless drunk, with a husky voice and a sliver of the possessed version of her Vanessa Ives character in Penny Dreadful, and it’s arguably more terrifying to find her in 1980’s suburbia. Eva Green is as magnetic an actor as there is working today (is there a more interesting one? Envision a movie that costars Green and Adam Driver), and her absence is felt as much as her overwhelming presence in this one. Good thing, too, because Eve Connors disappears in the second scene of White Bird in a Blizzard. Thankfully, she haunts Kat and us in flashbacks throughout the film.

On the other side of the coin, picture the gruff, built Christopher Meloni as a wimpy doormat of a husband (replete with caterpillar mustache), the reason for Eve’s sexual frustrations. It’s hilarious to even consider. White Bird in a Blizzard expertly plays with your expectations with its casting decisions, one of many misdirection tactics skillfully utilized by writer-director Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin). I haven’t even mentioned the presences of Angela Bassett as a purposefully cliché therapist, Gabourey Sidibe and Mark Indelicato as versions of the romantic comedy “best friend” staple, and Dale Dickey as Phil’s blind mother.

White Bird in a Blizzard is a movie filled with tropes from such varied genres as coming-of-age, romantic comedy, mystery/missing person and the American Beauty school of marital strife. We’ve seen versions of this story several times, but never quite mangled together like this before, which is precisely why I was so captivated, uncomfortable and surprised by this movie. Even its setting, in 1988-1991, filled with hilarious 80’s-isms, were almost a distraction from what was really going on. I went in knowing nothing about the plot of White Bird in a Blizzard, so instead, I relied on my preconceived notions about genre and similarly themed films, which is exactly what Araki and company wanted. The result is a movie that shocked and impressed me, mirroring Kat’s life-shattering and long-awaited realization in White Bird in a Blizzard’s final moments.

Magnolia Pictures will release WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD on OnDemand September 25, 2014 and in theaters October 24, 2014.