teenage
Owen Richards
Childhood is an inimitable experience – the laws of the world are less certain, imagination and reality meld together, and no event feels fixed. A Sicilian Ghost Story recreates this sensation in the context of real world trauma, producing a unique and sometimes unsettling cinematic experience.Luna (Julia Jedlikowska, pictured below) is a rather typical 12-year-old girl: precocious, imaginative, and very much infatuated with her classmate Giuseppe. Although they don’t have the same interests, they share something deeper, a comfort and belonging in each other’s company. On the walk home Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Lindsey Jordan was 16 when she released her first EP as Snail Mail on her local punk label Sister Polygon Records. Two years later, she has graduated from high school and signed to Matador Records, home of Stephen Malkmus, Kurt Vile and Helium. Lush is Jordan’s debut full-length album, which she describes as being “more deliberate” than her previous work.The record starts as it means to go on: unapologetically sad. This is a break-up album, and the painful confusion of young love rings through with every chord. A melancholic intro paves the way for “Pristine”, the first of many great pop Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Greta Gerwig, in her hugely acclaimed, semi-autobiographical directing debut (a Golden Globe for best director, five Academy Award nominations) opens Lady Bird with a Joan Didion quote: “Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”Brits may well think the place doesn’t look that bad, what with all the sunshine, big houses and swimming-pools, but 17-year-old Lady Bird (a delicate, acne-scarred Saoirse Ronan in a brilliant performance), who describes it as the mid-west of California, is keen to get the hell out of there. She longs to go college in New Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Watching the YouTube clips that accompany the release of the Vamps’ third album, Night and Day (Night Edition), it becomes immediately apparent how keen they are to come across as a "real" band. They talk eloquently about the writing process and are frequently filmed playing guitars. Good on them, we’re supposed to think. Good. On. Them. Well, quite. Except…When in the name of Depeche Mode did writing your own songs become a point of difference for a pop band? The key, surely, is to write good ones. That’s the space in which we can define the arena of judgment, surely? My son wrote a song Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
After the persuasive opening singles “Chained to the Rhythm”, “Bon Appétit” and “Swish Swish”, as well as all Katy Perry’s pre-release talk about “purposeful pop”, there was a feeling that Witness might push the boat out, taking Perry’s music into more intriguing terrain than previously. Perhaps it might even achieve the leaps forward made by Beyoncé with last year’s masterpiece, Lemonade, or Madonna’s transformations with producers William Orbit and Stuart Price, in 1998 and 2005 respectively. Unfortunately, while occasionally tasty, it cannot meet those comparisons, yet it’s still Perry’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's something to be said for encountering a playwright fresh out of the starting gate. Since his debut play Speech & Debate premiered Off Broadway almost a decade ago, Stephen Karam has gone on to write two altogether wonderful plays, the most recent of which, The Humans, won last year's Tony. This fledgling effort isn't in that league but has its charms, and Tom Attenborough's defibrillator production further marks out the fast-rising Patsy Ferran as a talent busily making her own way towards the big time. Ferran's success in the play's pivotal part of Diwata is doubly notable Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Her babyface spangled with tiny jewels and her lips painted fuschia, an adolescent with elaborately woven blonde hair lies on a silver velvet couch – round her neck and running onto her breast and down her right arm is a scarf of sticky blood as shiny as her blue vinyl (or cellophane) dress.Like a W magazine photo spread conceived by Baudelaire and art-directed in electric colours by giallo maestro Dario Argento, the opening of The Neon Demon offers a foretaste of the plasticated grand guignolerie that by the end of Nicholas Winding Refn’s meretricious psychological horror movie has yielded Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“All over the world, young people between the ages of 14 and 20 gradually spend more and more of their time away from the good influences of their homes and schools. What sort of people are they growing up to be?” Although the stuffed-shirt narrator cannot bring himself to say the word “teenager” of the film’s subjects, it’s a question asked in the 1954 Government-sponsored Central Office of Information short film Youth Club (1954) included as a crazy extra on a new package of Expresso Bongo (1959). The main feature and the same year’s Beat Girl answer it. But not in a way the squares behind Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Contemporary London life in all its forbidding, faceless swirl makes for a visually busy evening at Boy, the Leo Butler play that finally isn't as fully arresting as one keeps wanting it to be. An admirably kaleidoscopic view of the capital as filtered through 17-year-old Liam (Frankie Fox), aka the "boy" of the title, Sacha Wares' production utilises a 26-strong cast to address the notion of aimlessness in our age of austerity – the sheer volume of actors in our midst constituting a welcome rebuke to the pinched economic landscape all its own. But once you've clocked the populous Read more ...
Jasper Rees
About a dozen years ago the publishing industry cottoned on to the sex lives of women. Memoirs in which women wrote with complete candour about their sex lives appeared in sudden profusion, from Belle de Jour's blog-turned-book and The Sex Life of Catherine M to Jane Juska’s account about what happened when she advertised in the NYRB, aged 67, for sexual partners. At the younger end of the market there was One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by a Sicilian teenager known only (at her parents’ insistence) as Melissa P. Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl feels like a late Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If you’re between 12 and 15, The Vamps are big news. Ten million singles sales and 225 million YouTube views. That sort of big. They are, allegedly, not a boy band as they weren’t put together by one of Cowell’s televisual juggernauts. They also “play real instruments”, although I challenge anyone to come up with such software-amped earbud-candy in their garage. In any case, musical criticism is somewhat irrelevant, since the real purpose of this album is to act as a danger-free practice boyfriend for girls just starting to think about the real thing.The lyrics say it all: “Seven AM and you’ Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren’t they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they’re picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by the rules.But Aemonn O’Dwyer and Rob Gilbert break most of them in their new musical, The House of Mirrors & Hearts. Forget exotic settings: this type of family terrace house can be found by the thousand off the Kingsland Road. And forget happy families: this one’s falling apart. What’s more, the climax of the first act is a grisly accident involving a character we haven’t even met. And two of the key Read more ...