I know this might sound like a hyperbole, but just go with me on this one. I’ve just seen my favorite new release this year so far, and I’m hoping every movie lover sees it too. This new film is called Didi, a beautifully honest, coming-of-age comedy written and directed by an exciting, young, Taiwanese-American named Sean Wang (Nai Nai & Wai Po, 2023). Didi premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year and was happily picked up by Focus Features and distributed to select theaters nationwide in late July.

Set in a San Francisco bay area suburb in the summer of 2008, a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy tries to figure out important rites of passage (like impressing a pretty girl, getting invited to parties, and getting into fights) before he starts high school. As the first narrative feature film of Sean Wang, Didi is semi-autobiographical which is partly why the whole film feels so personal, lived-in, and genuine.

This director is smart, because this semi-autobiographical film is not just about displaying and recreating his childhood memories but about exploring the emotions and experiences in the whirlwind of adolescence. We’ve enjoyed films like this before like Stand by Me (1986) and Mid90s (2018). But Didi is memorably different presenting a part of 21st century, Asian American life in the early years of social media with the nostalgia of flip phones, Instant Messenger, and MySpace. (This social media element of Didi is reminiscent of the wonderful 2018 coming-of-age comedy, Eighth Grade.)

The title character is not easily lovable or well mannered. He blows up a mailbox, talks back to his mom, and shoplifts, and that’s what gives this film more personality than if it were created by a giant film studio or an oversized committee of executives. (I’m looking at you, Disney.) It’s because of this plucky, destructive personality that makes Didi touching and sweet without being annoying.

It’s hilarious without being predictable, and it’s heartbreaking without being maudlin. Some of the most tear jerking moments show just a computer screen while the 13-year-old boy types in his feelings and his internet questions. No other film in recent memory captures the everyday importance of the internet and social media (and the connections it promises) for young kids than this one.

This film made me so happy and reminded me of the importance of family and finding your people. The dialogue is simple, so it doesn’t try too hard in creating the perfectly relatable progression of the story’s themes of friendship, belonging, loneliness, and shame. Many of us have memories of being left out of parties or being ridiculed for our appearance, and Didi touches this nerve of teenage disgrace/contempt with startling, contemporary, and direct clarity.

Izaac Wang’s (Raya and the Last Dragon, 2021) role of the hormone-fueled awkwardness and angry exuberance of teen boyhood is both endearing and shocking (much like the boys his age in real life). One moment you want to hug him tightly, and the next moment to want to scream at him for being so awful. The teenage boy’s mother is played with silent frustration by established Chinese actress Joan Chen (Lust, Caution, 2007). Her performance is Oscar worthy with her tired eyes, soft voice, and isolated determination. The world could be more peaceful with mothers like her.

This film received the Audience Award and Special Jury Award at Sundance this year, and I can’t wait to see what other awards it receives next year. Please put this title on your list. You will finish it with a smile.

Yes, that old story. But even that brief synopsis doesn’t really begin to hint at the singularity – or the delight – of “Between the Temples.” The movie’s grammar – 16mm, improvisational, shot purposeful erratically by Sean Price Williams – is just as antic as its story. In this winningly chaotic comedy, you can almost feel the characters and filmmakers, as one, resisting order and pushing back against convention.

That makes for an experience as volatile and hilarious as it is sweet and profound. That’s particularly due to Schwartzman and Kane who, as a pair with some echoes of Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in “Harold and Maude,” make for the best canter-elderly bat mitzvah student duo you’ve ever seen, or, more simply, the most memorable on-screen duo of the year.

This is Silver’s ninth feature and possibly his finest. “Between the Temples,” playful, loose and dead set against any moment coming off as too polished or rehearsed, is always very close to falling into shambles. Or maybe it does, perpetually, but has the spirit, or foolhardiness, to keep going. With disaster ever present, “Between the Temples” ambles its way toward a scruffy, endearing magic of its own.

Ben Gottlieb works at a synagogue in upstate New York, but after losing his wife to a freak accident, he’s lost his singing voice and, maybe, his faith. Ben has moved back in with his mother Meira and her meddlesome wife Judith . In the movie’s opening moments, they introduce Ben up with a young woman, a doctor. He doesn’t get that this is a date; he assumes she’s a therapist. When he learns she’s a plastic surgeon, he asks his mom: “Do you think I need work done?”

But the work Ben needs goes deeper than that. “Even my name’s in the past tense,” he sighs. After listlessly sitting through temple alongside Rabbi Bruce , he walks outside and lies down in traffic. Nursing his grief over a mudslide at a bar , he gets into a fight. After Ben gets clocked, the woman who picks him up, having finished her karaoke performance, is Carla . She helps him through a drunken night before they realize she was his music teacher in elementary school. “Little Benny!” she exclaims once the memory returns.

Carla soon appears at the synagogue and tells Ben she wants a bar mitzvah. He doesn’t agree until she persists, but they soon find they fluctuate to some similar wavelength of grief and oddballness. Whether she’s an appropriate age for the coming-of-age ceremony is one question, but it’s also not entirely clear if Carla is even Jewish. While the Torah plays a role in the unfolding friendship, their connection – whether it’s love is hard to say – is only partly related to Judaism. They share stories of their dead spouses over burgers that Ben learns, while chewing, aren’t kosher. Silver films the scene in close-ups of their mouths. What seems clearer, in the script by Silver and C. Mason Wells, is that the two are together finding their way through a hard chapter of life and into another of their own making.

Along the way, there are surreal flourishes, moments of supreme awkwardness and comic high points. One scene, with Carla’s skeptical son and his family at a steak house, is adorned with ridiculously large menus. Silver has apparent affection for filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and John Cassavetes, but scenes like that one reminded me of Elaine May.

There is a wonderful feeling in “Between the Temples” that anything can happen at any moment. That’s particularly true in another dinner scene, one sensationally awkward, that brings all the characters together, including the more age-appropriate Gabby , the rabbi’s daughter.

Yet in a movie filled with strange noises and snuffed-out singing voices, nothing sounds as good as the patter between Kane and Schwartzman. The unique rhythm of their voices pushes “Between the Temples,” a film about finding your own faith, to something beautiful. “Music,” Carla says, “is the sound that you make.”

“Between the Temples,” a Sony Pictures Classics release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language and some sexual references. Running time: 111 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

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Actor Danielle Fishel is meeting a health challenge head-on, predicting she will be “fine.”

“I was recently diagnosed with DCIS, which stands for ductal carcinoma in situ, which is a form of breast cancer,” the “Boy Meets World” alumna, 43, said Monday on her “Pod Meets World” podcast. “It is very, very, very early. It’s technically Stage 0.”

Fishel found out about her DCIS — a cancer of the milk ducts in the breasts — during a routine mammogram, something she urges other women not to skip.

“To be specific, just because I like too much information all the time, I was diagnosed with ‘high-grade DCIS with microinvasion,’” she said. “And I’m going to be fine.”

High-grade cancer grows the fastest, is most likely to come back after surgery and is most likely to turn into invasive breast cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. “Invasion” refers to whether the cancer cells have grown past the breast ducts or nearby lobules.

Fishel will have the cancer removed surgically and then have follow-up treatments.

The actor, who played Topanga Lawrence on the 1990s sitcom, said she always thought she would “suffer in silence” if she got this kind of diagnosis until she was “on the other side of it,” and then she would tell people. But she said she’s learned along the way that the most learning can come from the beginning or “very messy middle” of a story, compared with hearing only the “pretty picture” some people present when their struggles are done.

“The only reason I caught this cancer so early, when it is still Stage 0, is because the day I got the text message that my yearly mammogram had come up, I made the appointment,” said Fishel, who reprised her Topanga role in the sitcom “Girl Meets World,” a sequel to the 1990s original.

“And the fact that I am good about going to my doctors appointments, when truthfully, it would be so much easier, with as busy as I am, with the 50 jobs I have, and the two kids and the husband and the house, it would be so easy to say, ‘I don’t have time for that. I went to my mammogram last year — I was fine last year. I don’t need to go this year.’”

But she took the slightly annoying path instead. “And they found it so so so early, I’m going to be fine.”

That said, she still has more to do, meeting with oncologists and other specialists before she makes the “big decisions” she has to make. Fishel noted that she might miss a few episodes of her podcast as she takes care of business.