Ten films on puberty for spring

It's the season of new beginnings, so why not sit down and enjoy Time Out's selection of ten films about puberty

1. WarGames, 1983
For some teenagers, the growing pains of adolescence can seem like the end of the world, and for unfortunate juvenile genius Matthew Broderick, they very nearly were! John Badham’s 1983 lo-fi nuclear war parable, ‘WarGames’, finds Broderick’s über-nerdy proto-slacker idly downloading porn onto his Commodore 64 when he misguidedly clicks on a website named ‘Red-Hot Missile Tubes’ and finds himself facing off with the US Department of Defense ICBM launch simulation computer. Trouble is, the computer has gone a little bit gaga and thinks it’s the real deal, which sets the machinery of war inexorably gearing up to DEFCON 1. Whoops apocalypse!

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
This one gets pretty heavy. Mankind – the cosmic problem child – undergoes its interstellar pubescence on the grandest, most fantastically confusing stage in Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 filmic distillation of novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s endless array of godless ideas. From its opening sequence of ingenious monkey men banging bones to the quaint '60s futurama of phallus-shaped spaceships and the dark, uneasy enlightenment offered by the unavoidable black obelisk of adulthood, ‘2001’ forces us to examine the tumult of sexual maturity at every turn. Its sequel, ‘2010: Odyssey Two’, went on to highlight the grim realities of setting up an ISA, moving to the suburbs and spending your Sunday afternoons mooching around garden centres wondering what the hell happened to your life.

3. X-Men, 2000
It can make you feel as if you’ve got a whole host of thrilling and almost uncontrollable powers – like you’ve joined an extra-special club or that you’re just so much more sensitive than your peers – but for that lucky few, ‘spring break’ can mean so much more. Hugh Jackman’s batshit Wolverine, Anna Paquin’s enigmatic Rogue and James Marsden’s very, very dull Cyclops are just a few of the mixed-up mutants at the heart of Bryan Singer’s adaptation of Marvel Comics’ funkiest family saga. In this universe, puberty can bring with it the added bonuses of telekinesis, invisibility and a preternatural ability to heal one’s wounds – undeniably useful tools for any teen.

4. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 1973
Okay, so he might have been the wrong side of forty at the time, but this surely makes Kris Kristoffersson’s refusal to assume the mantle of manhood even more admirable as snot-nosed outlaw Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah’s epic meditation on the changing values of the American West. While James Coburn’s patriarchal sheriff Pat Garrett huffs around New Mexico looking to put the hurt on his former brother-in-arms, the Kid’s off mucking about like an errant schoolboy. Bob Dylan’s righteous soundtrack may make noises about knocking on heaven’s door, but the only door Billy’s rappin’ is the one that says ‘Party on, muchacho!’.

5. Highlander, 1986
Growing up is a pretty standardised process: You’re born, you go through puberty, you go out fighting pointless battles on the Scottish mountaintops, you discover you’re immortal… Wait a minute? Scottish mountaintops? That can’t be right? Well it is. This Queen-scored invincibility saga sees Christopher Lambert as Connor McLeod (of the clan McLeod), a tartan-kilted ninny who discovers, after getting a broadsword through the abs, that he can only be killed if he gets his head chopped off. After spending his formative years cracking lame jokes about haggis and ‘trying for kids’ with the missus, an effete Spanish Conquistador played by Sean Connery (naturally) pays him a visit and teaches him how to properly swing his sword – the ultimate entry-point into manhood. 250 years later, he’s running an antique shop in downtown Detroit. Oh dear...

6. Teen Wolf, 1985
A schlocky kids flick about a teenager who discovers he has inherited a condition from his father where he has the ability to turn into a wolf, or a coruscating Aids parable to pair-up with Abel Ferrara’s ‘The Addiction’? Michael J. Fox plays Scott Howard, the smart-mouthed, college-bound rascal who busts into the bathroom at the point where his pops is developing fur. Perturbed as to how this congenital condition will affect his place in polite society (not to mention his popularity with ‘the birds’) for all of ten minutes, he soon discovers that this bizarre lupine ailment makes him a hotshot on the basketball court AND he can coerce Old Man Thorne by way of his red-eyed howl into selling him Bud Lite and jerky. Score!

7. The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane, 1976
Losing control – of emotions, vocal pitch, bodily fluids – is part of growing up, but here Jodie Foster is so keen to hold onto her spookily precocious 13-year-old self that she’s determined to see off anyone who peeks too hard into her splendid isolation. Holed up in a New England country house, the neighbours are soon poking into dad’s inexplicable absence and disturbing the girl’s bonkers little world. Mix in the unhealthy attentions of President Of The United States Of America, Martin Sheen, as a pet-torturing kiddie botherer and Foster’s crippled magician proto-boyfriend and you have a whacked out psycho-farce on the terror of entering adulthood that makes 'The Company of Wolves' look like the pretentious noodlings of a mucky sophomore psychology student.

8. The Butcher Boy, 1997
Neil Jordan's masterly, hyper-real head-mess makes tough breaks the rungs on Francie’s ladder to maturity, from a suicidal mum and a boozed-up marmalizer of a dad to the ceaseless war with next door’s archetypal snooty cow, Mrs Nugent. That the boy looks like a doe-eyed potato in shorts is of no help either but Francie is at least admirably determined to protect his family from the gossips of his buttoned-down rural Irish village, even if that means taking a huge blade and making a leaky sieve of Mrs N. It’s a surefire route to the House of Correction and regular visitations from Sinead O’Connor’s blissed-out Virgin Mary, dangerously, for our celebrity-obsessed age, suggesting that shanking your neighbours will get you face time with a pop star.

9. Jungle Book, 1942
You’ll know this version of Kipling’s fable from innumerable and bitter childhood disappointments when, having jumped out of bed at 7am on an Easter morning to catch a cross-dressing blue bear blow some hot jazz with a load of monkeys, you find yourself instead in a shadowy netherworld where Shere Khan stalks in silence and leaves a trail of orphans and widows in his wake. In boilerplate coming-of-age-style, the alarmingly crazed Mowgli leaves his adoptive wolf family to slay Khan, avenge his father and negotiate that tricky passage from beastly immaturity to a manful civilisation, allowing precious little time for anachronistic musical interludes – just the bare necessities.

10. Rushmore, 1998
Young Max Fisher’s got the right idea – best to miss out on the whole messy business entirely by eschewing the vagaries of teen angst and transmuting directly from speccy brat into fully rounded renaissance man. When, for instance, Bill Murray’s urbane industrialist Herman Blume moves in on the teacher upon whom one has romantic designs, one does not respond with callow, crimson-cheeked tantrums, but instead cuts the brake cables on the scurvy bastard’s Bentley. Jason Schwartzman’s Max teaches every spotty Simon or budding Betty that growing pains will not be salved with the writing of poetry or by pressing flowers, but only in a diamond-eyed staring match with the heart of the coming storm.

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