Why is Now and Then rated PG-13, and can a 10-year-old watch it?

It carries a 1995 PG-13, which mostly comes down to pre-teen swearing ("shit," "ass," "bitch"), frank kid-level talk about puberty and sex, and the central mystery involving a murdered mother and child. There's no graphic violence or sexual content on screen—just the Wormer brothers riding by naked from behind after stealing the girls' clothes at a lake, and Chrissy walking in on her mom giving her a panicked, zero-detail "birds and bees" talk. Most 10- and 11-year-olds handle it easily.

How scary is the graveyard seance and the 'Dear Johnny' storyline?

It plays like a campfire ghost story rather than a horror movie. The graveyard seance has a cracked tombstone and some wind effects, and there's a tense scene where the girls think a neighborhood drifter (Hank Azaria) is going to hurt them in the woods before realizing he's actually gentle. The darkest beat is purely verbal: reading an old newspaper article on microfiche and learning that 12-year-old Johnny and his mother were shot in their basement in 1945.

Will a kid in 2026 be bored by the 90s pacing and the adult scenes?

The opening ten minutes with the adult actresses in the 1990s can test a modern kid's patience—it feels like an episode of thirtysomething before the plot kicks in. Once the movie drops into the 1970 summer flashback, the pacing picks up fast. If your kid gets restless at the very beginning, tell them to give it until the girls are on their bikes in 1970.

How does this compare to Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret?

They make a great double feature. Margaret (set in the same 1970 era) is warmer, gentler, and focuses heavily on sixth-grade body changes and supportive family dynamics. Now and Then is rowdier, a little darker, and gives the girls dysfunctional families so that the friend group has to rely on each other.

Now and Then – WISE Score & Parent Review

Name: Screenwise
Author: Screenwise

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Screenwise Verdict

Critics trashed Now and Then in 1995 (38% on Rotten Tomatoes), mostly writing it off as a lightweight Stand by Me knockoff for girls. The critics missed why an entire generation of kids wore out their VHS copies: the 1970 summer storyline featuring Christina Ricci, Gaby Hoffmann, Thora Birch, and Ashleigh Aston Moore is sharp, funny, and honest about what it feels like to be twelve.

It's a double-layer nostalgia piece now—a 1995 movie looking back at 1970—which means modern kids are watching a doubly analog world. The pacing is slower than modern tween content, and the adult framing device with Demi Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, Melanie Griffith, and Rita Wilson is pretty cheesy. You can almost hear the script straining to connect the grown-up actresses to their younger counterparts.

Put it on for a 10-to-13-year-old who likes realistic friend-group dramas, especially as a co-watch. The PG-13 edges (chest-taping, divorce anger, fistfights, and a dark mystery involving a murdered mother and child) give it enough bite that a sixth-grader won't feel talked down to.

Age Fit

Sweet spot is 10 to 14—specifically for kids right on that awkward bridge between playing pretend and caring about middle-school social dynamics, plus any millennial parent looking for a nostalgia rewatch.

WISE Breakdown

Wholesome

82

The core friendship between the four 12-year-old girls is fiercely loyal and relatable. They navigate messy family stuff—divorce, grief over a deceased sibling and mother, and naive parents—by sticking together, even when their individual personalities start pulling them in different directions.

Imaginative

74

It captures the specific brand of pre-internet summer boredom where kids invent their own entertainment: holding graveyard seances, obsessed with solving a decades-old murder mystery, and saving up money to buy a treehouse.

Safe

76

Rated PG-13 for a reason. The girls tape their chests, get into fistfights with local boys, steal a dead kid's tombstone for a prank, and smoke cigarettes as adults. A central plot point involves uncovering a brutal 1940s double murder of a mother and child, plus a terrifying, realistic scene where a friend gets trapped in a storm drain during a rainstorm.

Enriching

78

Handles heavy pre-teen emotional beats—accepting parents' flaws, processing lingering grief, and dealing with body-image anxiety—without feeling like an after-school special. The adult framing device is cheesy, though, and drags down the smarter 1970 storyline.

Parent Info

✓

Why It Might Be Great

Peak 90s casting does the heavy lifting here: young Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, Gaby Hoffmann, and Ashleigh Aston Moore have electric, believable chemistry as 12-year-olds on the edge of growing apart.
Unsanitized tweenhood makes the characters feel like actual kids. Roberta (Ricci) tapes her chest flat so she can keep playing sports with the boys without being sexualized, and Samantha (Hoffmann) is openly angry about her parents' messy divorce.
Boredom-fueled adventure shows what summer looked like before phones: biking miles without adult supervision, earning quarters to buy a catalog treehouse, and turning a local cemetery rumor into a summer-long investigation.
Killer 1970 soundtrack featuring The Jackson 5,The Archies, and Three Dog Night keeps the energy high even when the script leans into melodrama.

⚠

What to Watch For

The Dear Johnny murder plot is surprisingly grim. The girls spend the summer researching a 12-year-old boy who died in 1945, eventually discovering he and his mother were shot to death by an intruder.
A genuinely stressful storm-drain scene. Samantha falls into a deep, filling culvert during a thunderstorm to rescue a dropped bracelet; the near-drowning panic feels real before an adult pulls them out.
Period-accurate 1970s kid behavior includes Roberta getting into multiple physical fistfights with the Wormer brothers, the girls skinny-dipping from the back after their clothes are stolen, and stealing a literal gravestone for a prank.
The 1990s adult scenes are rough. Demi Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, Melanie Griffith, and Rita Wilson play the grown-up versions, mostly Chain-smoking, drinking wine, and delivering clunky narration that interrupts the much better 1970 movie.

Conversation Starters

"Chrissy's mom refused to tell her anything about how babies are made and called it 'nasty.' Why do you think parents back then were so weird about talking openly?"
"Roberta hides the fact that she's growing up by taping her chest down, while Teeny can't wait to look older. Why does that transition at 12 feel so awkward in both directions?"
"When the girls grew up, they weren't all best friends the same way anymore, even though they still cared about each other. Does it make a friendship less real if it doesn't last forever?"
"What would you and your friends actually do all day in the summer if none of you had phones or screens and had to leave the house after breakfast?"

Deep Dive

Two movies stitched together, and one of them is great

Now and Then has a structural problem you'll notice in the first ten minutes: whenever Demi Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, Melanie Griffith, and Rita Wilson are on screen in 1991, the movie stalls out. They sit around in oversized 90s sweaters, smoke cigarettes, and explain the themes of the movie out loud.

The moment the camera flashes back to the summer of 1970 in Shelby, Indiana, the energy completely changes. The four younger actresses play off each other with zero Disney-Channel polish.

Roberta (Christina Ricci) is a tough tomboy grieving the car-crash death of her mother four years earlier, furious that her body is changing and ruining her neighborhood basketball games.
Samantha (Gaby Hoffmann) is the obsessive storyteller using the supernatural—tarot cards, seances, a dead boy's grave—to distract herself from her parents splitting up.
Teeny (Thora Birch) is boy-crazy, obsessed with becoming a movie star, and hiding how lonely she is with country-club parents who barely look at her.
Chrissy (Ashleigh Aston Moore) is the sheltered peacemaker whose hyper-domestic mother tells her sex is a horrible duty women just have to endure.

The Stand by Me comparison

Film critics in 1995 couldn't review this movie without comparing it unfavorably to Rob Reiner's Stand by Me. Both are set in a golden-hour mid-century summer, both feature four 12-year-olds biking along train tracks, and both revolve around a fixation with death.

Where Stand by Me is about boys testing their bravery against a hostile world, Now and Then is about girls trying to figure out what adulthood is going to cost them. Every adult woman they meet in town is a different cautionary tale: Samantha's bitter, newly single mom; Chrissy's repressed housewife mother; Cloris Leachman's imperious grandmother; and Janeane Garofalo's quick cameo as Wiladene, the snarky local psychic. Even the mystery of "Dear Johnny" ends up turning on a moment of empathy with Crazy Pete (Hank Azaria), the terrifying neighborhood loner who turns out to be Johnny's grieving father.

How it lands with kids in 2026

For a kid growing up in 2026, 1970 and 1995 might as well be the same century. What holds their attention isn't the period detail—it's the autonomy. Watching four 12-year-olds ride their Schwinn bikes into the next town over to visit a library microfiche machine without a single parent knowing where they are feels like science fiction to modern middle-schoolers.

If your kid likes the graphic novels of Raina Telgemeier or movies like Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., this sits in the exact same lane.