tue 02/07/2024

teenage

Emmy the Great, Pleasance, Edinburgh

“Are there any freshers in the audience?" asked Emma-Lee Moss halfway through last night’s set. Two voices raised a muted cheer. Whatever else your average 18-year-old might have been doing, cut loose from the apron strings for the first time in the...

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Educating Essex, Channel 4

Education, education, education. Have we ever worried so much about how, and what, and why, and where our children are being taught? We’re so desperate, it seems, for some guidance on the matter that we barely raise an eyebrow about turning their...

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Fright Night

After 10 minutes in the company of Fright Night’s vacuous US teens I was thinking, like Colonel Kurtz, “Kill them all!” One of the several virtues of this remake of the 1985 vampire horror-comedy is that its writer, Marti Noxon, feels the same way....

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BBC Proms: National Youth Orchestra, Jurowski/ Nigel Kennedy

Youth was everywhere to be seen at the Proms last night. Whether in the massed ranks of Britain’s National Youth Orchestra, soloist Ben Grosvenor (even younger than the precocious Benjamin Britten when he debuted his own Piano Concerto in 1938),...

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Kaboom

The playfully titled, deliriously deadpan Kaboom doesn’t so much explode onto the screen as briefly sparkle then fail to ignite. Superficially it’s an intriguing confusion of murder mystery, Generation Sex romp and slacker comedy, and is...

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Angry Boys, BBC Three

Chris Lilley as Gran with one of her juvenile charges in superhero pyjamas

Chris Lilley may not be a household name, but he is well known to comedy connoisseurs. The Australian's work, which he writes, produces and appears in - in several roles, male and female, adult and teenager - is exceptional, and is by turns funny...

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DVD: NEDS

Peter Mullan’s incendiary and long-overdue third feature is an unflinching, often hilarious look at a teenager’s inexorable descent into delinquency. NEDS (or Non-Educated Delinquents) begins in Glasgow in 1972, immersed in a rosy haze of promise as...

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Love Like Poison

Sensitive but unsparing, the debut feature from French writer-director Katell Quillévéré is a tender portrait of a shy, sweet teenager experiencing the first flushes of womanhood. Don’t be deterred by its somewhat sinister title; although Love Like...

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Hanna

Hanna begins with a bang, and there will be those for whom the excitement never lets up – especially if you like your action movies all but bereft of chat. The young assassin of the title scarcely needs words when her days are given over to taking...

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N-Dubz, Brighton Centre

N-Dubz's music is throwaway post-grime cheese-pop aimed at fans aged between 10 and 20, max. I've been writing a rearguard action for electronic pop in the pompously self-assured court of rock for more than a decade so I arrived at the Brighton...

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Tender Napalm, Southwark Playhouse

Playwright, film-maker and polymath Philip Ridley has had a great couple of years. All over the place, there have been powerful and revealing revivals of his 1990s classics, such as The Fastest Clock in the Universe. His 2000 play, Vincent River,...

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Red Riding Hood

Once upon a time, Gary Oldman acted in the plays or films of Caryl Churchill, Mike Leigh and Alan Bennett, bringing a deliberately disorienting intensity to whatever the role. But here he is in Red Riding Hood snarling commands like “You will die...

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