#coming-of-age

#coming-of-age

The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it's all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else. In fact, reading an account of someone's university days is surely only one or two stages removed from having to hear about the dream they had last night.

LUNA's music resonates deeply as it explores the journey of coming of age in one's early twenties. She navigates self-discovery, queer identity, and mental health, all while reflecting on the places that have significantly influenced her life. Her ability to encapsulate the bittersweet essence of formative moments, those experiences that exist in the delicate balance between euphoria and pain, makes her an artist unlike any other.

Out of Words is made from clay, fabric, and glue: a love story literally crafted by hand that even caught the attention of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima (The biggest praise we could imagine, game director Johan Oettinger says.) Oettinger dreamed of making a stop-motion video game since he was 12, when he first played 90s point-and-click claymation game The Neverhood.

The majority of "Stooper" takes place at the track where the boy's father asks him, "Who do you like in the second?" making sure the boy understands it's not who do you "want," but who do you "like"? There's something about Captain Midnight that captures the boy's interest. The father explains "odds" to him and that Captain Midnight is a bad bet (10-1 odds). The boy insists. It's his money, he can do whatever he wants with it. Captain Midnight, it is.

Hollywood's vision of the future has been unmistakably bleak of late. Where franchises like Star Trek are consistent with their ideas of an eventual utopia, it's going to take a lot of work - and time - to get to that point. It's a dismal prophecy to those of us living through the 2020s, an era depicted thoroughly (and not too optimistically) across Star Trek's history. It's hard not to succumb to the feeling of doom as our ecological circumstances get dimmer by the day.

The Knightling wants to be a heart-warming indie game about an apprentice stepping out of his master's shadow while also being a throwback action-platformer where you bash monsters with a giant talking shield. It mostly succeeds thanks to its charm and platforming, even if its combat and pacing can't quite keep up. Our main character is the knightling to the legendary hero Sir Lionstone, who is famed for defeating a powerful Earthborne and claiming its magic sword and shield.

The Special Presentations description at TIFF is as laconic as it is cogent: "High-profile premieres and the world's leading filmmakers." The films in this dispatch boast star all-star casts and tell coming-of-age stories of a sort, but they're really stories about people who have to accept parts of themselves they'd rather keep hidden, and begrudgingly accept ways community can help ground them while all else spirals out of control.

Much of direction is production: the material conditions under which a movie is made plays a major role in the creative process. Movie lovers tend to think of producers as dictators of formulas, oppressors of originality, the enemies of art, but that just reflects the unfortunate history of studio filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. In fact, producing a movie can be a kind of art in itself, a practical imagining of possibilities for filmmakers that they wouldn't themselves have come up with.

Sixteen-year-old Smidge is on the run, burdened with a shameful secret. Together with her fellow runaway, a performance artist called Violet, she travels through the underbelly of America, desperately searching for a way to rise above her past. On meeting a travelling circus filled with misfits and drifters, they think they might have found a home. But as Violet is drawn under the influence of its sinister ringleader, Smidge learns that belonging comes with a price. Forced to choose between her past and present, Smidge must confront the shame that has shaped her, and return to face her flawed mother, before it is too late.

A stone carving of Nyami Nyami, the River God, the spirit snake. My first instinct was fear that one day I would break it. It looked fragile, a needle of stone with Nyami Nyami's serpentine body coiled up and gathered at the top, where instead of a snake's head, a fierce fish's head sprung out bearing sharp teeth. It was surprisingly heavy.

Tom is clearly in the Hardyesque tradition of unworldly young men who tend the land or work with their hands (Gabriel Oak, Jude Fawley), and it's this that alerts us to his vulnerability to charmers and chancers. Apprenticed by his pop at 14 (every other Flett had been a shrimper, going back to his great-grandpa), Tom nevertheless longs for a life less circumscribed.

The fact that the film has had the life that it's had, that it's transcended generations, was certainly not something that any of us anticipated when we made the film," Estevez told the Daily News in 2019. "How could you?

Lucija is a shy 16-year-old who is a member of her Catholic school's female choir; she joins the choir's special trip across the Italian border for a week in Cividale del Friuli.

"Have a Grubby day!" is a frequent refrain in Julian Glander's Boys Go to Jupiter. It's the catchphrase for Grubster, a Grubhub-esque food-delivery service for which Billy works, reflecting his life's humiliations in the gig economy.

Taylor, raised by a young single mom, masks her emotional vulnerability with sarcasm while managing her relationship with her boyfriend and complicated friendships.

My Adventures with Superman is a coming-of-age action-romance series that reimagines the early days of Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen as 20-something interns at the Daily Planet.

"Drolma, a young Tibetan singer, struggles to adapt to the fast-paced life in Beijing, reflecting the tensions of globalization and cultural identity."

The series has me hooked. I'm already dreading its end - and searching for more shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty.

Ty's character embodies a typical teenage blend of humor, crisis, and quest for identity, revealing the inner life of a young adult navigating life's complexities.

I am a bit of a romantic,' game director Johan Oettinger told me, describing the relationship between the game's playable characters, Karla and Kurt. Typically, 'they can talk about anything. But they find themselves in a moment in their relationship with something new in the air.' But sadly, Oettinger added, 'they can't find the words' to say how they feel. Out of Words is a coming-of-age love story about the things we want to say but don't know how.

Ultimately, Byron's experience highlights a complex intersection of gender identity and exploitation, capturing both the struggle for self-understanding and the grim realities many young people face.

Murderbot, a self-aware security cyborg, navigates its newfound freedom while hoping to pursue trivial pastimes instead of its programmed duties.

At Camp Gonedoor, campers find their own unique meaning of 'coming of age', from confronting fears in the woods to exploring connections with crushes.