Nicholas Ray's 1955 teen issue drama is re-released as part of a James Dean season at London's BFI Southbank. I haven't seen it since the last revival in 2005. Then it looked to me stuffy, with a reactionary insistence that men's failure to be real macho types was leaving their sons with problems; the issues of gay sexuality and abuse appeared to be skirted around, and everything was seen from the fussy older-generation's perspective. All this is probably still true, but I responded more positively this time. Dean's performance has such an extraordinary, feline potency and the opening scene is actually brilliant: Dean's Jim Stark reels drunkenly into the police station's juvenile division and mocks everyone, while Natalie Wood's Judy, in another office, tremblingly recounts her horror at her dad's contempt, smearing off her lipstick with his hand, and is even more ambiguously upset when the cop informs her that her mother, not her father, would be coming in to pick her up. The planetarium sequence still delivers a charge, with its eerie, materialist vision of the end of the universe.