My American Cousin
- warm
- gentle
- intimate
Warm, kinetic, gentle drama / coming-of-age, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Sandy Wilcox is a pre-teen girl in rural 1950s British Columbia whose longing to be treated as an adult is roused even further when her older American cousin, Butch Walker, comes for a visit.
Our read · My American Cousin (1985) reads as a warm, kinetic, grounded drama · coming-of-age entry — gentle in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of My American Cousin
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a gentle nostalgic Canadian coming-of-age summer story.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if you need high stakes or plot over quiet character moments.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself