I say this with my whole heart: Greta Gerwig's Little Women is wonderful. Full of wonder, inspiring wonder, embodying wonder. Which is hard to do as the eighth adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's beloved 1868 novel of the same name. The most recent of which came out in 1994 and starred Winona Ryder as the headstrong, aspiring writer lead character Jo March and a young Christian Bale as the floppy-haired, wealthy boy-next-door Laurie.

While some have declared that 1994 version as definitive, Gerwig's adaptation—which she both wrote and directed—feels neither redundant nor stale. Rather, it's a fresh, modern-feeling take on a well-trodden story, stuffed with excellent performances, witty dialogue, and gorgeous costumes. And despite its PG-rating it's not just for the children, but a delight for people of all age groups. Bring the whole fucking family.

Eschewing a linear storyline, Gerwig opted instead to layer the plot nonlinearly, with the viewers' only hint at where we are in time being the camera filter (a warm filter connotes childhood while the cooler one is adulthood), a choice that could prove to be slightly confusing for those unfamiliar with the material. But the film begins near the end of the story when Jo (Saoirse Ronan) leaves her hometown of Concord, MA to move to New York City and become a writer, forming a budding friendship with the charming Prof. Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel, a French actor some of you may know from his popularity on Tumblr in, like 2010!).

The film jumps between Jo's "present" life in a post-Civil War America and her childhood, living at home with her three other sisters and mother, awaiting the family patriarch to return home from the war as they struggle to make ends meet. They are led by the warm Marmee March (Laura Dern), a Transcendentalist who imbues her four daughters with curiosity and generosity.

There's also Meg (Emma Watson), the eldest and the one closest to being married off, a decision the other girls find preposterous; the quiet and ill, but gifted, Beth (Eliza Scanlen); the young, sassy Amy, played by English actress Florence Pugh who manages to steal every scene she's in, shifting from infantile child to mature adult with ease. Together along with their wealthy, dreamy next door neighbor Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), these "little women" argue, play, wrestle, and talk over each other with such genuine charm that they feel like a real family, a pleasant summer storm that blows across the screen, giving life to everything it touches.

The direction and sense of characters are particularly strong in this adaptation. It fleshes each sister out so that she feels real and worthy of empathy, not purely serving as a star vehicle for Ronan in the same way the Ryder version arguably did. Gerwig suffuses all of her films (both as an actor and director) with a kind of warmth and generousness that pulls you in. There's even a nod to some of her own previous roles. Like in the beginning of the film when an older Jo runs through the muddy streets of late 19th century New York after getting a story published, joyous, resplendent, and not unlike Gerwig's character in Frances Ha running through those same streets to David Bowie's "Modern Love" more than a century later.

But despite this charm and depth of intimacy, there's already a narrative surrounding Little Women that it won’t win awards or even do well at the box office because it doesn’t explicitly appeal to men. When the Golden Globe nominations were announced last week, Gerwig was conspicuously missing from the Best Director category (as was every woman ever) with Ronan receiving the sole acting nomination and the composer Alexandre Desplat picking one up for Best Score. The film also received exactly zero nominations from the Screen Actors Guild Awards. What gives? (Cough, sexism.)