teenage
emma.simmonds
Idiotically buried by a release which sees it appearing on just one screen nationally, Kenneth Lonergan’s triumphant follow-up to his Oscar-nominated debut You Can Count on Me (2000) is, without a scintilla of a doubt, one of the finest films of 2011. Rich, resonant and with a meticulous approach to characterisation, it captivates, convinces and challenges.Margaret opens on the streets of New York in intermittent slo-mo, giving the impression of a city collectively under strain (not least as such images are sombrely set to Francisco Tárrega’s "Recuerdos de la Alhambra"). Our protagonist is Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Can the Hanson brothers ever rid themselves of the shackles of “MMMBop” (the 1997 hit that brought them global renown)? More to the point, should they bother to try? These were the burning questions I armed myself with as I prepared to watch a band whose progress, it’s fair to say, I’ve hardly followed in the last 15 years since their falsetto singing and rambunctious head-banging brought the world such joy. So, having done some serious mugging up, and listened to their back catalogue, I was interested to see where fortune would have taken the clean-cut trio with the flowing blond hair.As Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The life-swap doc comes in sundry guises. Emissaries of simpler cultures visit our broiling cities to gawp at streets swimming in fresh spew and rivers of piss every Saturday night. Alternatively our lot pop off to places where people shit in holes and praise the Lord. Whichever way the story gets sliced, it’s always about the same thing: holding up a mirror to ourselves and not tending to like the view. Here’s what we look like when we stand next to this or that person with whom we wouldn’t change places for anything.Last year a programme called Amish: The World’s Squarest Teenagers brought Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As supremely silly as they are, the Twilight movies are made watchable by Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan, whose combination of fidgetiness and aloofness puts me in mind of James Dean’s Cal Trask and Jim Stark. If not as virtuosic as Dean (she's as beautiful), Stewart has made Bella as potent an empathy-figure for today’s alienated teenage girls with Gothic fantasy lives as Dean made Cal and Jim for would-be rebellious youths in the Fifties. You can fully understand why she has millions of female fans.With her latest role, however, Stewart flies in the face of Bella’s virginal cool by Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Nearly 20 years have whizzed by since Jonathan Harvey, then a 24-year-old comprehensive school teacher, wrote a play in the school holidays – and caused a stir. That play was Beautiful Thing, dealing with the then (and now?) contentious issue of two 16-year-old schoolboys, next-flat neighbours in the high-rise south-east London council estate of Thamesmead, who fall in love – and overcome prejudices and obstacles, not least their own self-realisation.It was a daring work. “I wrote it out of anger and outrage,” Harvey says in the programme notes. “The age of consent for gay men was 21, whereas Read more ...
fisun.guner
Based on the novel by SE Hinton, The Outsiders is a tender coming-of-age movie set against a tough backdrop of flick-knives, rumbles and gang warfare. In Francis Ford Coppola’s vision, it’s also a romantic cinematic homage to Gone with the Wind.Released in 1983 to a fairly mixed critical reception, the story is set in 1960s Oklahoma and involves the gang rivalry between the Greasers, a bunch of kids born on the wrong side of the tracks, and the Socs, affluent prep boys. It's told through the eyes of Ponyboy (C Thomas Howell), a 14-year-old Greaser who is involved in an opening chase sequence Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“Why does anyone ever have kids?” By the time a character in April De Angelis’s new comedy utters this exasperated exclamation, there are many in the audience - whether parents or children, or both - who must have had the same thought. And more than once in the evening. For this exceptionally hilarious and perceptive play, which opened last night, not only tickles the insides of your arm, but also lights up the senses and then gives you a quick cuddle, too.Hilary is 50; she lives with her husband Mark and 15-year-old daughter Tilly. It’s a nice middle-class family. So when Tilly brings home Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“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 capital city on a Friday night, they were unlikely to be listening to music this polite and well behaved. Or so you’d hope.She may be less widely heralded than Laura Marling, but both women have recently been doing their utmost to transcend the creative straitjacket of middle-class nu-folk girls-with-guitars. This, oddly, has left Moss's music Read more ...
graeme.thomson
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 trials and tribulations into fodder for reality television. Never mind the dubious ethics, we might learn something.Educating Essex is a seven-part fly-on-the-blackboard documentary examining life for the teachers and Year 11 pupils at Passmores Secondary School in Harlow, Essex. The access, we were told, was impressive. I could think of some other Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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. Partnering this Buffy veteran with Craig Gillespie, the director of sensitive man-and-sex-doll romance Lars and the Real Girl, makes this deeply unpromising entry in the current cycle of Eighties horror reboots surprisingly engaging. A keen cast including Colin Farrell as king vampire Jerry and David Tennant as a burnt-out Vegas magic act add to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
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), Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, or DJ-turned-composer Gabriel Prokofiev, it was an evening celebrating the scope of the teenage experience. Even the Late Night Prom joined in the party, coming courtesy of Nigel Kennedy, still surely the oldest and most defiant teenager in classical music.It doesn’t get much more self-consciously youthful and hip than Read more ...
emma.simmonds
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 relentlessly prone to flights of Gregg Araki’s trademark psychedelic fancy. As shag-happy as a teenage boy, with its drugs, witches, cults and cast of nubiles it sounds like fun, right? Unfortunately, for the most part, it’s a bit of a drag.In Kaboom our hero, Smith (Thomas Dekker, pictured below with Juno Temple), is plagued by mysterious dreams featuring Read more ...