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Love, Simon

8/10

Stars: Nick Robinson, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Garner, Tony Hale, Talitha Bateman

Director: Greg Berlanti

Eponymous teenager Simon (Robinson) lives in an archetypal sanitised-by-Spielberg American suburb, complete with loving parents Garner and Duhamel and sister Bateman.

He attends an apparently by-the book American high school and enjoys the company of his friends and, for a while, you begin to suspect that you are in for another pleasantly digestible teen film in the finest John Hughes tradition.

Wrong.

17-year-old Simon is gay but has yet to come out to family or friends. Instead, resorting to the potentially dangerous age of the internet, he opens up about his sexual identity on the school's blog site via a computer and, apparently, finds his new true love 'Blue' and begins an online relationship with his anonymous classmate - only to be blackmailed by a fellow pupil who wants his help in romancing a (female) classmate.

Thanks to Robinson's perfect and, above all, convincing characterisation, along with fine work on both sides of the camera, what then happens to him as he is faced with trying to resolve the problems, caused both at home and at school when he is outed, make for alternatively funny, depressing but ultimately fascinating and surprisingly mature for a mainstream American movie.

Armed with an emotionally effective screenplay by Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker (based on Becky Albertalli's novel Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda - a title sensibly changed for the screen) and ideal casting, director Berlanti doesn't put a frame wrong in delivering a different, charming, amusing and, above all, believable teen coming-of-age story.

And the moral, if there is one?

Don't trust the internet!

Alan Frank

USA 2018. UK Distributor: 20th Century Fox. Colour.
109 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 12A.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 1, Violence/Horror 0, Drugs 1, Swearing 2.

Review date: 08 Apr 2018