Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #35: Rushmore (1998).

15-year-old Max Fischer is simultaneously somehow every teacher's wet dream and worst nightmare. He is a scarily smart but recalcitrant pupil at the elite Rushmore Academy, where he edits the school newspaper and heads extracurricular clubs and societies devoted to basically anything legal. But due to this ubiquity on campus, Max's grades are going downhill like an avalanche and he is on the verge of expulsion.

During his latest campus activity, a big-scale play he's written to be performed in the school's auditorium, Max is shocked when he meets and then falls for widowed elementary teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), so much so that he elects to install an aquarium on campus in her honour. Yet another spanner lands in the works, however, when Max becomes entangled in a love triangle with Miss Cross and his wealthy but deeply depressed friend, steel tycoon and father of two of Max's classmates Herman Blume (Bill Murray). Now Max must navigate this, his first romantic minefield, get back on top of his schoolwork, and start to secure his future.

Rushmore (1998) really is a bildungsroman like no other. Wes Anderson is certainly one of those filmmakers you either love or hate (although I actually find his work quite hit-and-miss), but with this he and co-writer Owen Wilson have hit on a beautifully funny, celebratory oddball tale and revel in spinning it for everybody. Their screenplay channels the academic environment and Max's teenage prodigy mentality to a convincing fever pitch, and Anderson's visualisation of it matches that throughout. Olivia Williams, perhaps obviously as a teacher, has the film's moral voice and she makes Miss Cross a realistically layered woman, and Bill Murray is equally memorable in a breakthrough dramatic role. But naturally, this is Schwartzman's show the whole way. Francis Ford Coppola's nephew (his mother is Francis' sister Talia Shire), his gawky but driven manner here helps us care for Max even though he is often consciously an obnoxious little shit. And, most important, his comic timing is superb in every scene.

Kids, don't be quite like Max Fischer. But, to all of you: do, well, rush out to see Rushmore.