Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more

 

The Year My Voice Broke (1987)

Director: John Duigan

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A film to restore one's faith in films about the transition from adolescence to adulthood. It's 1962 in the Australian backwater town where callow teenager Danny (Taylor) has grown up with the slightly older Freya (Carmen), an orphan child with a murky past who feels like an outsider. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is showing at the Astor, The Shadows strum 'Apache' on the radio, and car-stealing delinquent Trevor (Mendelsohn) fancies himself as the local rebel without a cause. Using telepathy, 'force fields', and hypnosis, Danny tries to win Freya's love, but the bad boy hunk aims lower and scores... So sure is writer/director Duigan's feel for the characters, the period, and the prevailing moral climate, that the faintly supernatural elements are effortlessly integrated: as the mystery surrounding the local 'haunted house' unfolds, there is an uncanny sense of a scandalous episode in the community's history repeating itself. A lovingly crafted and deeply affecting film, this might be likened, in terms of both quality and perception, to Rob Reiner's excellent Stand By Me.

Author: NF

Time Out Film Guide


  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields





Features

Different Strokes

Different Strokes

Chris Smith dips his toe into new waters in The Pool.

Street fighting men

BAM celebrates John Carpenter’s sci-fi-inflected rage against the machine.

Zoom in:

<em>They Live'</em>s Roddy Piper

The American experience

British comedian Steve Coogan gets in touch with his inner Yank in <em>Hamlet 2.</em>

Spanish intuition

Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall flirt away an Iberian summer in <em>Vicky Cristina Barcelona.</em>

Shadows and frogs

Crime pays in Film Forum’s expansive French noir series.

Strip tease

IFC’s new midnight-movie series revisits Hollywood’s groovy ’60s scene.

To air is human

<em>Man on Wire,</em> a new doc about a surreal Manhattan morning, aims high.