Tag: teenage

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Brides

Director – Nadia Fall – 2025 – UK – Cert. 15 – 93m

***

Two radicalised British, teenage girls run away from home intending to become brides for Islamic State – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 26th

When they meet at the local school, Doe (Ebada Hassan) and Muna (Safiyya Ingar) strike up an unlikely friendship. In a way, they’re like chalk and cheese – Doe is the quiet one, always observing, while Muna is brash, loud and outgoing. Both come from Muslim backgrounds, and both feel alienated from their classmates, their school and wider British culture. Muna sticks up for herself against school bullies, and effectively gets vilified by the school authorities, and as a result her father, for doing so.

So, without their parents’ permission, they fly off to Turkey to meet up with a man who has groomed them online as brides for Islamic State. When their contact never shows up at the airport, they resolve to find their own way into Syria. As well as following their journey, the narrative frequently lapses into often confusing flashbacks about their home and school lives. And infuriatingly, it never explores how they fare when their their rose-tinted idealism collides with the harsh reality of becoming jihadist brides.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

How to Train Your Dragon
(2025)

Director – Dean DeBlois – 2025 – US – Cert. PG – 125m

****

Instead of fighting dragons like other viking teenagers, Hiccup shoots a dragon out of the sky then secretly trains it as his steed– live action remake of animated classic is out in UK cinemas from Monday, June 9th

Following in the footsteps of Disney, who are slowly but surely turning their back catalogue of animated features into live action movies, Dreamworks have taken the plunge and turned the first of their three animated How To Train Your Dragon movies into live action. Director DeBlois previously directed the three animated outings, and clearly cares a great deal about the franchise because he has made a live action equivalent of the first film with the same plot, dragons that look near identical, and locations that feel like those in the original.

If you’re an admirer of the first film, which I am, as you’re watching this new one, you feel like you’ve seen it all before. Except, this is in live action. It’s enjoyable enough, and avoids the obvious trap of trying to redesign its classic animated characters for live action (the trap that Disney’s Snow White remake (Marc Webb, 2025) walked straight into with its hyperrealist dwarfs).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

This is England

Director – Shane Meadows – 2006 – UK – Cert. 18 – 101m

A young, pre-teenage lad falls in with a gang of skinheads in Post-Falklands War, Thatcherite Britain – originally published in Third Way in 2007, to coincide with the film’s UK release date

The above one line synopsis, although accurate, doesn’t even begin to convey the piece’s considerable strengths. (Note: Meadows would subsequently develop this into a series of TV dramas in the UK using many of the same cast and characters: This is England ‘86, This is England ‘88 and This is England ‘90 in 2010, 2011 and 2015 respectively.)

Meadows is a unique and powerful voice, a teenage school dropout who kicked off his career in features with 1996’s 60-minute feature Small Time and went on to greater things TwentyFourSeven (1997) and critical favourite A Room For Romeo Brass (1999). His highest profile effort is the less impressive Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (2002), which suffers from trying to make an epic with an all-star British cast. Meadows is not about big movies (not yet, anyway) – he began shooting movies with mates as actors and has an uncanny ability to draw incredible performances out of actors and non-actors alike, based as much on the people concerned as on their acting ability.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Picnic at Hanging Rock
(Director’s Cut,
4K Restoration)

Director – Peter Weir – 1975 – Australia – Cert. 12a – 107m

*****

A group of teenage schoolgirls supervised by two teachers go on a picnic beside an isolated volcanic outcrop: three of them never return – Valentine’s Day previews on Friday & Saturday, February 14th & 15th, then is out in UK cinemas from Friday, February 21st

Two locations sear themselves into your brain when watching Picnic at Hanging Rock, whether for the first time or the umpteenth. One is the obvious one – the eponymous, towering rock formation in Victoria, Australia, at once an inescapable presence in a landscape and an invitation to come into its labyrinth and explore. The other is Appleyard College, a turn of the (nineteenth into twentieth) century boarding school for young ladies, shot in the real life 1870s-built, Georgian mansion Martindale Hall. They are two very different worlds, one natural, wild, and inexplicable, the other buttoned down and socially stratified.

The picnic, which takes place on St. Valentine’s Day, 1900, only seems to take the first third of the film’s running length. Two teachers, Miss Greta McCraw (Vivean Gray from The Last Wave, Peter Weir, 1977) and the French mistress Mlle de Poitiers (Helen Morse) are in charge of around a dozen teenage girls, all dressed very prim and properly.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Crazy Family
Gyakufunsha Kazoku,
逆噴射家族)

Director – Sogo Ishii – 1984 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 105m

*****

After proudly moving into their first home as owner-occupiers, a family go berserk and destroy the building – out on Blu-ray on Monday, June 17th

This seemingly starts out as a conservative family drama. The family in question comprises father Katsukuni Kobayashi (Katsuya Kobayashi in his debut feature role), mother Saeko (Mitsuko Baisho who worked with directors Akira Kurosawa, Shohei Imamura and Kaneto Shindo), elder teenage son Masaki (Yoshiki Arizono from Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris, both Takashi Miike; Electric Dragon, 80,000 V, Sogo Ishii, all 2001) and younger teenage daughter Erika (Youki Kudoh from Typhoon Club, Shinji Somai, 1985; Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch, 1989; Heaven’s Burning, Craig Lahiff, 1997). The Kobayashis move in to their first home as owner-occupiers which, although it’s a little on the small side, promises an idyllic existence. Father is the breadwinner with a nondescript office job, mother waters the plants and does the cooking and housework, the daughter wants to be an idol singer and the son is spending all his time studying for school and university in his room upstairs.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Ghostbusters
Frozen Empire

Director – Gil Kenan – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 115m

****

Back in New York, running the family Ghostbusters business out of the old fire station, the Spenglers must thwart an evil entity who possesses the power to freeze things – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 22nd

This sequel to Ghostbusters Afterlife (Jason Reitman, 2021), written by the same three-man writing team of father and son Ivan and Jason Reitman and Ghostbusters geek Gil Kenan, picks up and runs with some of the strengths of its predecessor even as it dispenses with others. One thing it dumps is the previous entry’s completely out-there originality; instead, it follows the time-honoured principle of Hollywood movie sequels: go out and make the first movie again.

It’s basically a rehash of the original Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984) with the younger generation of Spenglers standing in for the old, and with Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), Ray Stantz (Dan Ackroyd), Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) and Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) from the original helping the newer characters out. There is not, perhaps, as much of Bill Murray as one would like, and his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. Otherwise, though, fans of the franchise will probably be happy.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Lonely Castle
in the Mirror
(Kagami no Kojo,
かがみの孤城)

Director – Keiichi Hara – 2022 – Japan – Cert. – 116m

*****

Seven children are sucked via mirrors in their homes into a mysterious castle perched high above a sea, presided over by a wolf queen, and prowled by a hungry wolf at night – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2024 between Friday, 2nd February and Sunday, 31st March

Teenager Kokoro Anzai (voice: Ami Touma) can’t face going to school. Her understanding mother (voice: Kumiko Aso) takes her instead to the Classroom of the Heart at an alternative school for a session with friendly teacher Mrs. Kitajima (voice: Aoi Miyazaki). This is to be Kokoro’s new school, but in the end, she can’t face going to that one either, so her mum phones her in as sick.

Moping in her bedroom, she is attracted to lights glowing around the tall mirror there before touching its surface which, like the mirrors in Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950) dissolve to allow her to pass through them into another world. On the other side, she finds herself in a castle perched high on a rock above a sea along with six other kids – tall Aki (voice: Sakura Kiryu), soccer player Rion (voice: Takumi Kitamura), computer geek Subaru (voice: Rihito Itagaki), piano player Fuka (voice: Naho Yokomizo), enigmatic Masamune (voice: Minami Takayama), and dumpy Ureshiro (voice: Yuki Kaji).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Holdovers

Director – Alexander Payne – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 133m

*****

A teenage pupil must remain at school in the care of his strict and widely despised Ancient History teacher over the 1970 Christmas holidays – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 19th

A school movie with a difference: this takes place not in term time, but in the holidays. Specifically, a New England boys’ boarding school in the 1970 Christmas holidays, when, for various reasons, five pupils – three teenage, two younger – are unable to go home for the seasonal break, so must instead be looked after by a member of staff at the school. That task falls to ancient history teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), who is filling in for the member of staff who made up a story about a difficult family health situation to get out of being lumbered with the task. Paul is put upon for jobs like this because he’s the guy who can’t say no; he’s also a stickler for hard work and discipline who is disliked by fellow teaching staff and pupils alike.

Once the other staff and students have left, one other person remains on the premises: the head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who has a connection to the institution beyond her employment.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

A Normal Family
(Bo-tong-ui Ga-jog,
보통의 가족)

Director – Hur Jin-ho – 2023 – South Korea – Cert. – 116m

***

Lacking any moral sense of right and wrong, the teenage children of two brothers, a lawyer and a doctor, kick a homeless man to death – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

After a road rage incident in which an out of order, rich twentysomething wilfully runs down an irate baseball player who objects to his driving, and puts the baseball player’s young daughter in a coma, the twentysomething hires defence lawyer Jae-wan (Sol Kyung-gu from The Boys; Chung Ji-young, 2022; 1987: When That Day Comes, Jang Joon-Hwan, 2017; Memoir Of A Murderer, Won Shin-yeon, 2017; Peppermint Candy, Lee Chang-dong, 2000) who is motivated not by justice but by doing everything he can to get his client off scot-free. Jae-wan has a new, young wife Ji-su (Claudia Kim from Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald, David Yates, 2018; The Dark Tower, Nikolaj Arsel, 2017; Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Joss Whedon, 2015) with a small baby and a teenage daughter Hye-yoon (Hong Yi-ji) by his late first wife.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles
Mutant Mayhem

Directors – Jeff Rowe, Kyler Spears – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 99m

*****

The much loved comic-generated franchise gets a remakable reboot in animation that breaks the filmmaking mould to really get under the skin of the teenage experience – out in UK cinemas on Monday, July 31st

Hollywood animated children’s films since the advent of computer animation. They all look the same. Okay, that’s not entirely fair, but with notable exceptions like the Laika films and the recent Spider-Verse films there’s a definite homogeneity to this output overall, industry wisdom dictating the production parameters and the overall look and feel. There’s a mould there, the films make money and producers are terrified to break that mould. Not so here.

The irony is that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property, born out of a late night joke between two comic book artists who never expected to sell more than a one-off issue, has spawned numerous spin-offs in comics, animated TV series, video games and movies. Somehow, the previous six movies – three in the 1990s (including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Steve Barron, 1990; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze, Michael Pressman, 1991), one in 2007, and two more in the last decade following a reboot in 2014 – never quite delivered on the promise of the franchise, as if everyone concerned was too focused on the moneymaking potential and trying to play everything safe, an approach completely at odds with that of the two artists who originated the property and simply thought of it as a fun idea worth developing.… Read the rest