Prove me wrong: the term coming-of-age is just a fancy way of saying that a movie is about absolutely nothing.

You nailed it

These movies are boring.

> [Coming-of-age] movies are boring.

"Ninety percent of everything is crap." -- Theodore Sturgeon

There are different kinds of nothing.

usually character driven like rebel without a cause or juno

I think the term itself is very generic and often misused. As I mentioned in my other post "Coming of Age" is applied to a film like Porky's which is very low brow and vacuous. Then you have Stand By Me as mentioned by Shogun of Yonkers, there is a lot more to that film and it is far more serious. And you have Karate Kid which would be somewhere in between.

That is another problem with the term. When I see "Coming of Age" as a description I tend to roll my eyes a little as I know it could be anything, in the end coming of age just means you will be seeing a film about kids/teens growing up through some kind of experience.

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"Coming-of-age" is a colloquial term that just means a slice-of-life story about adolescence or young adulthood.