teenage
emma.simmonds
Confounding expectations from the first frames, Girlhood is the endearingly scrappy and staggeringly beautiful third film from French writer-director Céline Sciamma (Tomboy) and no relation to Boyhood. Intimate and exuberant, it's a coming-of-age story that takes us into the company and confidences of a quartet of teenage girls. They're part of a community of marginalised minorities living in the rundown Parisian suburbs, and have forged their own alternative family unit as a sanctuary from and defence against domestic abuse, poor prospects, societal assumptions and criminal opportunists. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For somebody who never seems to be short of things to say, journalist and author Caitlin Moran doesn’t half like to repeat herself. Raised by Wolves is, for those of you keeping score at home, her third attempt to tell the story of growing up chubby, eccentric and poor in Wolverhampton. Like last year’s novel How to Build a Girl this one is nominally fictional, but the addition of younger sister Caroline (Caz) as co-writer introduces something new.That something, as Raised by Wolves returned for a full series after 2013’s pilot, was red-haired Aretha (Alexa Davies), cynical, precocious and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Philippa Perry, 20 years a psychotherapist, was the dashing narrator of this history of 300 years of agony aunts (or uncles). Wearing a bright orange coat, she cycled between libraries, universities, newspaper and magazine offices, looking at centuries-old publications and interviewing contemporary writers. It was a fact-studded visual essay, but in spite of the raciness of its subject, oddly bland.It all started in the 1690s with The Athenian Mercury, published for one of the new coffee houses which had sprung up in London. Its editor-in-chief John Dunton is given the accolade of inventing Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Robert Mitchell's second ode to innocence lost is a rather more twisted take on the subject than his first film, The Myth of the American Sleepover. That was a beautifully judged ensemble coming-of-ager which merely teased us with horror tropes. Alongside the titular teen tradition it featured an abandoned warehouse, a Ouija board, a trip down to the basement and a midnight swim. With his chilling follow-up Mitchell goes full horror, presenting us with a STH: a sexually transmitted haunting.It Follows updates Halloween's suburban horror story – where the adults disappear, leaving Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
New Adventures, the name of Matthew Bourne's company, has a ruddy-cheeked, Boys’ Own ring to it that has – until now – been rather belied by his oeuvre, which includes a dance version of Edward Scissorhands, as well as dark retellings of all the traditional story ballets. But the New Adventure which rolled into Sadler’s Wells last night really is an adventure – an adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the desert island schoolboy story heavy with allegory about the propensity of human beings to descend into barbarism.Civilization and barbarism are complex terms, and political Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Beethoven went deaf at 26, we're helpfully informed near the start of If I Stay in a bit of information that pales next to the tin ear on display in this late-summer romantic tragedy, which aims to position Chloë Grace Moretz as the next Shailene Woodley. (The actresses are all of five years apart, which constitutes a veritable lifetime in Hollywood). Even more than The Fault in Our Stars, the popular book-turned-film that places tragedy directly in the path of teenage love, this latest young adult novel to become a doomladen tearjerker displays a pretty strange set of priorities. I doubt I'm Read more ...
graham.rickson
These annual treks to Leeds Town Hall on muggy June evenings have become a bit of a tradition. Going to see Opera North’s Ring feels increasingly like attending a fan convention, though instead of wearing tight lycra and assorted helmets, attendees tend to sport sensible footwear, smart trousers and blue blazers. Would Wagner have approved of this performance of Götterdämmerung? His theatre at Bayreuth was designed so that the musicians would be hidden. The Leeds Grand Theatre pit is too small for a Wagnerian orchestra, so Opera North have upped sticks and moved a few hundred yards west to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Two movie-obsessed high-school students Owen and Matt (Owen Williams and Matt Johnson, who also writes and directs) are making a short movie about bullying for their film class. After they show it, to widespread derision from their classmates, the bullying gets worse (by boys they call the "dirties") and so the two teenagers decide to make a new version, incorporating secretly filmed footage of them being harassed and assaulted.As Owen and Matt develop a narrative for the foul-mouthed, Tarantino-esque movie, it becomes increasingly about enacting revenge on the dirties. Matt is the driver of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Biança Barker's film was broadcast to coincide with the run-up to the Grand National this weekend, although one got no sense of where its subjects fitted into the horse racing world in general. In fact, one got no sense of where they fitted into anything other than a tickbox used by TV producers when looking for the next big idea. Animals, troubled teenagers, non-nonsense adults trying to knock them into shape, school of hard knocks, last-chance saloon. It had all of these, but woefully lacked impact.It followed three teenagers on the intensive 10-week jockey-training programme at the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anyone who secretly liked High School Musical or is a fan of Mean Girls or Glee will find something to like in Darren Stein's candy-coloured high-school satire, which detonates some teenage culture bombs (albeit some of them years behind the curve) while giving some hearty laughs.When quiet and unassuming Tanner (Michael J Willett) is outed, suddenly he becomes hot property for the school's clique queens – Mormon princess 'Shley (Andrea Bowen), sassy drama diva Caprice (Xosha Roquemore) and bitchy blonde Fawcett (Sasha Piertse). If they all sound like stereotypes, you're absolutely right Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the end of its first series, My Mad Fat Diary had departed far enough from memoirist Rae Earl’s frank, funny source material that the adaptation taking on a life of its own shouldn’t have been a cause for concern. Still, there’s always that niggle when something that got it so completely right first time around returns: can it possibly repeat that magic, or live up to expectations?Hence why it was such a relief to hear the inner monologue of Earl’s semi-fictional counterpart (Sharon Rooney) during her first sexual experience - well, non-solo one at least. “What if I don’t feel anything?” Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Among all the frank, hilarious bits that peppered Caitlin Moran’s bestselling book How To Be a Woman, it was the early chapters – the ones that dealt with the author’s unconventional upbringing in the suburbs of Wolverhampton – that seemed most ripe for repackaging for television. Whether Raised by Wolves lives up to its promise as a coming-of-age comedy drama for any teenage misfit that ever had an annoying sibling remains to be seen. So far, only this pilot episode has been produced. But on the strength of this sample Channel 4 could do worse.Although co-penned by Moran and her sister Read more ...