SnoopyStyle In Scotland, gangly Gregory and his friend are sex-obsessed teenagers. They try out for Coach Menzies to play football but they are all pathetic. In steps Dorothy who becomes the best footballer on the team. Gregory is in awe and in love. He learns Italian for her but she sees him as "slow and awkward". It's so hopeless that even his mature 10 year old sister Madeline tries to help. He asks Dorothy out and is surprised when she agrees. But it doesn't turn out the way he expected.I love the awkward dorkiness of John Gordon Sinclair. It's got many of John Hughes' moves like selling Dorothy's picture in the bathroom. I love Gregory's relationship with his sister and I love the lying down dancing. The young amateurs try their best with varying degree of success. The movie is simply charming and lovely. It's a fun little teen coming-of-age indie.

GD Cugham 'Gregory's Girl' is not without its critics. With a young cast culled from the first generation of genuinely aspirational working class families in the West of Scotland, it has incurred jealous vitriol and ridicule in equal measure. Some of the acting is indeed amateurish and awkward, but maybe that adds to the fundamental stock of truth this film possesses.Through the eyes of Bill Forsyth, the in-turns gauche and austere architecture of Scottish "New Town" Cumbernauld is filmed like it is California. Little wonder that the directors of teen-com fayre like 'Never Been Kissed' and 'Ten things I Hate about You' cited 'Gregory's Girl' as an inspiration. It is precisely in the naive reach for futurism in the environment of Cumbernauld that the naive reach for emotional and cultural exploration and awakening by Gregory and his friends becomes magical. They are comfortable but ordinary people in a place designed to be concrete and ordinary, yet Forsyth's camera sweeps the edifice and corridors of a cuboid High school as if it is a giant chocolate box, full of character, wild normality and the simply accepted surreal (the lost penguin costumed child; Chic Murray's Jovian, distracted headmaster.)The film came on the cusp of economic and industrial upheaval in Scotland, but revealed that our old gods and spirits are still looking at us, possessing us, foxing then protecting us, be they in the guise of a cloud, a kite or spinning the world upside down so that love may flourish.

paul2001sw-1 Watching 'Gregory's Girl' for the first time in over two decades, one is immediately struck by reminders of when it was made: the grainy film, the dreadful soundtrack, the big hair of both its male and female characters. But one is soon also reminded of why it proved such a massive hit, in spite of it's low budget, unpretentious nature. For at its heart, Bill Forsyth's film captures two eternal realities, the (potentially charming) essential uselessness of a certain sort of teenage male, and the particular uselessness of just about all males when confronted by a sufficiently pretty girl (Dee Hepburn, although Clare Grogan, later a pop star, appears in a secondary role). But the gentle narrative eschews the obvious cliché, and it's also nice to see a story set in a Scottish housing scheme that isn't just a tale of drugs and A.I.D.S. It still feels funny and true after almost thirty years.

jonmeta A lot of so called comedies get one or two big laughs in the whole film, often by reaching down for a reference to one or another substance that comes from the human body. Gregory's Girl makes me laugh every few seconds, and the only mention of a bodily excretion I can remember is Andy's "chat up line" in the school cafeteria: "Did you know that when you sneeze, it comes out of your nose at a 100 miles an hour?" Even though I thought I knew all the funny bits after seeing it so many times, each viewing finds me laughing at things I hadn't noticed before, as well as at all the other bits that never seem to grow stale.There's the occasional Pythonesque line, as the football coach's description of the "two basic skills" of a goal scorer: "Ball control, shooting accuracy, and the ability to read the game." But Forsyth the writer creates a constant stream of little gems that are very much his own style of wry humour, taking real life and stretching it just that little bit further, but not so far that it's no longer recognisable. He's got teenage life down perfectly. Girls talk, plan, and seem to know what they want. Guys are clueless. Guys are obsessed by numbers. But girls know all the best ones.It's fun to see how comic setups and situations from Gregory's Girl come back in Forsyth's Local Hero ("everyone's second favourite film", as Mark Kermode put it), deeper and more fully developed. Despite the dated fashions and soundtrack, highly recommended.