Carey Mulligan is delightful in Brit coming-of-age drama An Education. It’s London, 1961. Jenny is stuck between childhood and adulthood. She excels at school and has a real chance of being accepted at the elite Oxford University. At home she sings to French music against her father’s better wishes and dreams of visiting mainland Europe in the hope of discovering what she believes is the free-wheeling and care-free culture she is imprisoned from at home…

Two classics from the 1980s for you in Midnight Double Feature #3. Teen angst and bad behaviour go just that little bit further in Michael Lehmann’s “Heathers” and Mark L. Lester’s “Class of 1984”. Both films look at teenager life in a way that would make John Hughes cower behind the sofa. Cynical, dark, unsentimental, at times funny, at other times quite frightening, these two films paint an alternative picture of growing up.

“Stand By Me” is one of the finest Stephen King book-to-screen adaptations ever made. Director Rob Reiner had a knack with King’s material as he also brilliantly brought “Misery” to the screen. In “Stand By Me”, a tale steeped in 1950s nostalgia, four childhood friends set off on a journey to find the missing body of one of their classmates. The friends, portrayed by young actors River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Wil Wheaton, and Jerry O’Connell, discover more than just a body on their travels, each finding a bond within one another that would last for the rest of their lives.

Companion review for Top 10 American Coming of Age Dramas
In a suburban home, in a dusty dark attic, behind some damp old boxes, in a wooden picture frame lies the key to an adventure only dreams can create, but in Richard Donner’s wonderful 1985 ensemble film, the dream is reality. From the imaginations of two of cinema’s children-in-peril masters – Steven Spielberg (from Elliot’s ‘He’s a man from outer space and we’re taking him to his spaceship!’ in E.T: The Extraterrestrial, to Tim and Lex watching a cup of water …

Stephen King’s stories are extremely difficult to bring to the big screen. Not only because of such things as the complexity of the overall narrative, the multi-character plots, or the lack of a pivotal driving force; but the fact that most of his stories contain ‘horror’ that can only be suggested in print, that is so surreal, and largely created in your own mind that putting it on screen is totally useless.
Stanley Kubrick had to create a new vision for The Shining to the point where Stephen King couldn’t …

The 1980’s produced some of the best and most cherished coming-of-age, comedy-dramas to grace theatre screens, and it is these that the era is most fondly remembered for. George Lucas’ 1973 ensemble piece American Graffiti and Richard Linklater’s superb Dazed And Confused (made exactly 20 years after Lucas’ effort), are notable absentees of the eighties teen catalogue, but what does become apparent is that not one but several films made between 1982 and 1989 equal or better the quality of these two films that arguably standout in their respective decades …

The ‘coming of age’ movie is a bit ambiguous. There’s a tendency to link the sub-genre to films about kids, so Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and Jeff Daniels in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars seemingly came of age too late in life. It appears there’s a timeframe on the coming of age movie that sits somewhere between childhood and adulthood before, as protagonists grow into their twenties, the film fuses itself with other sub-genres like the yuppie-in-peril or social problem movie …