teenage
emma.simmonds
You wait ages for a French film about a teenage girl's sexual awakening and then two come along at once. Actually who am I kidding? As any filmic Francophile will tell you it's not exactly a rarity. Still, red-hot on the heels of the astonishing Blue is the Warmest Colour comes François Ozon's Jeune et Jolie. As sleek and enigmatic as its protagonist, whereas Blue gave us a messy relationship and bodily fluids (including snot), Jeune et Jolie is an altogether cooler, stranger and unfortunately not nearly as credible affair - although it is a lot shorter.Jeune et Jolie is the mercurial Ozon's Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In this refreshingly rowdy, distinctly feminist film from debut writer-director Maggie Carey an inexperienced, tirelessly sensible teenage girl prepares herself for college life by taking charge of her own sexual awakening. She does so in a way that's hilariously overly administrative, with her plans taking the form of the title's tawdry, quite literal "to do list".Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza is gifted the role of Brandy Klark, school valedictorian and virgin. As the film opens, the year is 1993 and Brandy's sights are set on college and little else. That changes when she's conned Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Coming-of-age films have frequently featured inebriated antics and ill-advised hook-ups, but it's usually the teenagers behaving badly. The Way Way Back sees a family decamp to an East Coast beach house for a summer vacation described witheringly by one teen as "Spring Break for adults". The film is the directorial debut of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (two of the Oscar-winning screenwriters of The Descendants), who also pen the excellent screenplay and take supporting roles.Duncan (Liam James) is a painfully shy 14-year-old from Albany who hangs uncomfortably in his own skin and can't seem to Read more ...
David Nice
Or, The Lord and Lady Macbeth of the Seizième, as imagined by a bourgeois teenager who fancies himself to be Bougrelas, heir to the Polish throne. That's one way of looking at the concept so dazzlingly carried through by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod with the French wing of their Cheek by Jowl Company. It’s a chaotic tale told by a big kid, as the 23 year old Alfred Jarry still was when he part-engineered a scandal for the 1896 Paris premiere of Ubu Roi, a platform at last for the savage, potty-mouthed and pot-bellied anti-hero Jarry had dreamed up years earlier in revenge against a Read more ...
Simon Munk
Like a faded star, wearing the moth eaten dresses of her past, still stalking a shuttered Hollywood set, Lara Croft has seen better days. Ah, the old days – she made or broke consoles, appeared on fashion magazine covers, had Angelina Jolie play her in the movies.Lara Croft was the originator and undisputed queen of action-adventure. That was the old days. Her star has long faded, her crown snatched by the cheeky new tomb raider on the old block – Nathan Drake of the Uncharted series. But wait, what's this? A new, younger Lara? Could it possibly work? Thankfully, this audacious reboot doesn't Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
About the only thing I dislike about My Mad Fat Diary is the title. Based on a similarly-titled teenage memoir by the writer Rae Earl, the first episode of this six-part comedy drama is touching, hilarious and perfectly cast. And the lead character, who introduces herself as a “16-stone 16-year-old”, has just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital after four months of in-patient treatment, so it’s certainly apt.Besides, Rae would never be the type to tiptoe around two of what she sees as her defining features with delicate language. Young Glaswegian actress Sharon Rooney plays the book’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The latest film from innovative firebrand Sally Potter is something of a surprise given her back catalogue. Her last feature, Rage (2009) premiered on mobile phones and the internet and comprised a series of to-the-camera monologues; the one before that Yes (2004) was told in iambic pentameter; and, she is of course the maestro behind gender-bending masterpiece Orlando (1992). Ginger & Rosa – a sweet and sour coming-of-age story - by contrast seems pretty conventional, following two teenage girls who have been best friends since their simultaneous birth.It’s London, 1962, and Ginger and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Being such a massive phenomenon has made The Hunger Games an easy target to tilt at but the truth is that, staying close to the Suzanne Collins novel, this film adaptation is a lean, smart science fiction thriller that there’s much to like about. The premise is that in the future the USA has become a nation called Panem, 12 serf states ruled by the Capitol who organise an annual televised competition designed to engender obedience in the populace. On it a pair of "tributes" from each district fight to the death on the live TV show of the title. Sixteen-year-old poacher Katniss Everdeen ( Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Affairs, arguments, accidents. Feminism, marital failure and a fear of ageing. Jumpy has plenty of conflicts and issues, dunked in a wonderful bittersweet humour. But while April de Angelis faces uncomfortable truths, she fails to deal with them with equal courage. This play gnashes its teeth – at the gap in communication between generations and at the eternal pursuit of youth – but it lacks bite.Jumpy, which was first on at the Royal Court last autumn, is worth seeing for Tamsin Greig alone. Greig plays Hilary, a middle-class, middle-aged mother having an identity crisis. As Tilly, her Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Who knew back in 1999 that a comedy about a bunch of teenage boys desperate to lose their virginity before they graduated from high school would be so popular? Adam Herz's script for American Pie, filmed by debutant directors Chris and Paul Weitz, was a huge box-office hit, and spawned two sequels; American Pie 2 (2001), American Wedding (2003), and now a third - American Pie: Reunion. There were also four spin-off straight-to-DVD films. Perhaps most notably, it presaged the perils of sex and the internet and brought the term “milf” to worldwide attention.The title famously refers to a scene Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Given the numerous and now pretty tiresome comparisons that pundits and punters alike have drawn between the Hunger Games trilogy and the inexorable Twilight saga, it’s worth taking a moment to imagine how the franchises’ respective heroines might get on if they actually met. One can’t imagine they’d see eye to eye on much.The Hunger Games’ fiercely self-reliant Katniss Everdeen is a 16-year-old with the weight of a broken world on her stoical shoulders, fighting tooth and nail to protect her family from starvation and violent oppression. Twilight’s meek, passively dependent Bella Swan Read more ...
graham.rickson
As an evening out, Angus is about as nutritious as the midget gems dispensed by one of the heroine’s confidantes (and offered in heaps to the audience waiting in the foyer). Directed by Ryan McBryde, this stage adaptation of Louise Rennison’s chirpy bestsellers just about hangs together, even though the moments where it succeeds most effectively are the points which most explicitly reference other coming-of-age narratives.Rennison’s source material does well in evoking the clumsiness, the sheer awkwardness of adolescence. And the familiar ingredients are all here: a quirky band of close Read more ...