Lady Bird to Moonlight to Boyhood. The films that capture what becoming a person actually feels like from the inside.
The coming-of-age film is one of cinema's quietest genres. It rarely has the box-office of action or the prestige of historical drama. It also tends, year after year, to produce some of the most-emotionally-precise work in any given year's output. The form's central question — what does it actually feel like to become a person — does not have a satisfying answer in any other genre.
Most films about adolescence in mainstream cinema treat the subject as comedy or romance. The coming-of-age film, properly, is something else: a serious attempt to render how the inside of a person changes between, say, eleven and twenty. The interior shift is the subject; the external plot is usually small.
This is part of why the form keeps producing breakthrough debuts. Lady Bird, Eighth Grade, Moonlight, The Florida Project — almost every one of the films listed above either announced a director's career or significantly redirected it. The form rewards directors who can render interiority without exposition, and that's a skill that translates outward to almost every other kind of film.