5 Girls on AllMovie

Recalling both the 1994 masterpiece Hoop Dreams (it sports the same producers) and Michael Apted's legendary Up series of documentaries, Maria Finitzo's sociological portrait 5 Girls (2001) observes the challenges, travails, hopes, dreams, and triumphs of five Chicago-area teenage girls over the course of a four-year high school tenure. With intimacy and candor, cross-cutting between stories (with roughly an equal amount of time spent on each subject), Finitzo covers such areas as individual sexual awakenings and inner-city impoverishment. On a broader level still, she watches as each girl blossoms into a young woman, with everything entailed and necessitated by that transformation.