At The Movies: How To Have Sex a study of female adolescence, Fingernails serves up quirky romance

How To Have Sex (M18)

98 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on Thursday
4 stars

The story: Three English schoolgirls descend on the Greek party island of Malia for a post-examination holiday in this 2023 Un Certain Regard winner from the Cannes Film Festival. Boys and booze are on their itinerary.

The British rite-of-passage drama How To Have Sex is not an instructional manual, whatever the title may suggest – and however much Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) needs one as she is goaded on by her more worldly companions, brainy Em (Enva Lewis) and catty Skye (Lara Peake), to lose her virginity before they head home in a week.

The BFFs are on their first girls’ trip abroad.

In the adjoining room of their budget motel are two older lads (Shaun Thomas and Samuel Bottomley). Together, they hit the bars and clubs for never-ending nights of bacchanalia.

Such summer breaks are a ritual among Britain’s youth.

Writer-director Molly Manning Walker has been on a few, and her feature debut is a vividly alive re-creation, sticky with sweat and spilled tequila shots.

The electronic dance music alone will give anyone aged above 25 a hangover.

Gradually, Tara peels away from the sea of pulsating bodies to be the story’s focus after having sex at last, although not the way she had wanted.

She becomes sad and withdrawn, a vulnerable 16-year-old beneath the party-girl bravado.

Walker knows how lonely one can be in a crowd, how exhausting the pretence at fun can get and how friendships can shift.

“Best holiday ever,” the friends had ecstatically promised. How hollow that sounds now.

Without judgment or coming-of-age cliches, the film-maker delivers a nuanced and observant study of teen relationships, peer pressure and sexual consent.

Hot take: Here is an acute picture of the female adolescence experience from the hormonal highs to the lonesome lows.

Fingernails (NC16)

113 minutes, premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday
3 stars

The story: In a retro-future present, technology can measure a couple’s love from their extracted fingernails. Anna (Jessie Buckley) is a new counsellor at one such Love Institute, who scored 100 per cent with her long-time boyfriend (Jeremy Allen White). So, how is it possible that she finds herself falling for co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed)?

The timeless familiarity of his dystopian fables is the central weirdness of Athens-born auteur Christos Nikou’s Greek Weird Wave cinema, a movement which counts Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, 2018) among its other proponents.

Apples was writer-director Nikou’s acclaimed allegory of an amnesia epidemic that was released in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic.

The serio-comedy Fingernails is his English-language sophomore feature, set in a cosy North American city.

The sole technological gizmo is the amusingly low-resolution fingernail-testing microwave and the tests are, of course, a satire of finger-swiping dating apps.

The eternal search for a soulmate is now all a function of diagnostics, even in real life.

Only marginally more absurd are the couples’ pre-test intimacy exercises.

On the curriculum are underwater eye-locking for developing endurance, skydiving and French karaoke sessions, because French is the language d’amour.

Anna grows restless in her relationship as she coaches her clients through the stunts.

Her partner, a nice enough guy, is a homebody. They spend their nights on the couch watching nature documentaries.

He is played by television hottie White (The Bear, 2022 to present) and the actors are superb, especially Buckley (The Lost Daughter, 2021) and Ahmed (Sound Of Metal, 2019) in their characters’ unspoken growing attraction.

The performances carry the movie long after it has made its point about the thrilling unpredictability of passion.

Love is unquantifiable, and chemistry is not science.

Hot take: The wonderful acting adds to a quietly quirky romance about the arithmetic of love.