teenage
Thomas H. Green
Anne-Marie Nicholson is a hard-working young woman from Essex whose career description is “Global Girl-next-door Pop Star”. She has incrementally worked her way there, attended the marketing meetings. Anyone requiring a CV that exemplifies the steady, data-farmed, disciplined path to contemporary major label pop stardom, should look to hers. Spontaneity and originality are out, every media detail is micro-managed, but a multi-platform, multi-territory project such as this can reap grand rewards. Her second album maintains the planned trajectory, conceptually streamlined, nothing unpredictable Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 2021 is like taking a trip in a time machine and stepping out into a totally different world. The 1982 teenage comedy marked the debut of director Amy Heckerling (who would go on to make Clueless) and writer Cameron Crowe (who later wrote and directed Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous). Rolling Stone journalist Crowe was 22 and went undercover, impersonating a student at a notoriously wild high school in California to write about kids taking drugs, partying, and having sex. It’s hard to imagine journalism’s codes of practice allowing Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sequin is the screen name for the questing 16-year-old at the slowly awakening heart of Sequin in a Blue Room, a 2019 Australian film only now reaching the UK. The graduation project of its New Zealand-born director and co-writer Samuel Van Grinsven, the 80-minute movie charts a mostly compelling path from multiply meaningless gay hook-ups through to something at least resembling a connection, if the image of shared popcorn at the end offers any indication of happier times ahead. Structured across a series of apartments that count down from ten to zero, the screenplay (co-written with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A teen comedy with a thematic difference, Moxie has enough memorable moments to firmly establish comedian Amy Poehler as a director worth reckoning with in what is her second film, following Wine Country in 2019. Telling of the teenage Vivian's coming-of-age as a rebel against the landscape of #MeToo, the Netflix movie goes enough of the way towards transforming this genre's familiar tropes that one only wishes it had enough, well, moxie to go still further. There's undeniable pleasure to be had from the collective awakening that transforms the female student body of Rockport High in a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Adam (Charlie Plummer) is being tested for glaucoma at the start of Words on Bathroom Walls, the director Thor Freudenthal's adaptation of Julia Walton's 2017 Young Adult novel. In fact, the indrawn teenager is suffering from schizophrenia and will soon embark upon a disorienting sequence of events that finds him on meds and then off again, in and out of school, experiencing bullying from a group of boys and the possibility of romance with an especially clever girl. All the while, the frequently straight-to-camera narration promises that a difficult story is not going to go all Hollywood on Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rocks is a beautifully made slice of neo-realist filmmaking which deserves to get a wide audience but may well slip off the radar in the current climate. It really should be experienced in a cinema as the camerawork by Hélène Louvart is stunning and the sound design is excellent.Co-written by playwright Theresa Ikoko from her original story, it follows a few days in the life of Rocks, a 16-year-old girl growing up in Dalston. It’s the end of the summer holidays and her widowed mum is having mental health problems and has taken herself off. She’s left a bit of cash and a note saying that she Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In normal times, Edinburgh Festival audiences would now be packing into the city’s invaluable Traverse Theatre, home to some of the most vibrant new writing in the country. Instead, the Traverse has created a new online venue, Traverse 3, that exists to extend its festival programme throughout the year and can point to an immediate success in a new 30-minute online film, Declan, adapted from a recent stage hit at this same address.The source material for the actor Lorn Macdonald’s directorial debut is Mouthpiece, the 90-minute play by Kieran Hurley in which Macdonald Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Musings on the agonies of adolescent love fall like dead weight in this wearying if well-acted adaptation by writer-director Richard Tanne of the 2016 Young Adult novel Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland. 17-year-old Henry Page (Austin Abrams) falls hard for Grace Torn (Lili Reinhart, from TV's Riverdale), the indrawn new transfer student at his New Jersey high school who walks with a cane and speaks of needing her sins erased.Henry craves experience and gets rather more than he bargained for from the anguished Grace, with whom he bonds over Pablo Neruda sonnets and shared work on the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Canadian-Iranian director Sadaf Foroughi offers up a gut-wrenching tale of adolescent rebellion set against the strictures of an oppressive Middle Eastern society. It rivals the work of Asghar Farhadi in quality, telling the story of a 17-year-old student whose strong-willed ways lead her into conflict with her watchful parents and teachers. To Western eyes, Ava’s (Mahour Jabbari) acts of adolescent rebellion seem slight – wanting to study music wouldn’t often be met with disapproval by parents. At school she chats innocently with her best friend Melody (Shayesteh Sajadi), talking Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Babyteeth gets off to a terrific start. A semi-naked, manic Moses (Toby Wallace, full of scabby charisma) almost pushes 15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen; Sharp Objects, Little Women) on to the Sydney train tracks as she waits on the platform in her school uniform, carrying her violin. It’s a thunderclap: she’s smitten. The next scene is just as intriguing, with Ben Mendelsohn (The Outsider, Bloodline, Animal Kingdom) on fantastic form as Henry, a psychiatrist, eating a sandwich and having sex with Anna (Essie Davis; The Babadook, True History of the Kelly Gang) in his consulting room.The fact Read more ...
Matt Wolf
We first see Leigh (Frankie Box), the cheeky heroine of Scottish writer-director Eva Riley’s debut feature Perfect 10, hanging upside down during a gymnastics workout. The image is appropriate given that the teenager’s Sussex life – an aimless routine given what vague shape it has by her athletic interests – is about to be turned upside down by the unexpected arrival in her midst of an older half-brother, Joe (Alfie Deegan), whom she’s not known before.What transpires is a tale that locates real sweetness within the sullen as the duo form a bond, however shortlived, that takes them both by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorrah shone a blinding light on the Camorra crime clans of Naples, and spun off an acclaimed film and equally admired TV series. This film version of his 2016 novel La paranza dei bambini (“The Children’s Gang”) isn’t in the same league as either of those, but its account of the way criminality is a kind of hereditary condition in some areas of Naples still packs a punch.Star of the show is 15-year-old Nicola (Francisco di Napoli), leader of one of the teenage gangs who scrap it out around town (the opening scene features a balletic fight in a shopping mall, with the Read more ...