Men, Women and Children: Strong performances but attempt to warn against over digitalised lives trips up MEN, WOMEN CHILDREN follows the story of a group of high school teenagers and their parents as they attempt to navigate the many ways the internet has changed their relationships, their communication, their self-image, and their love lives. The film attempts to stare down social issues such as video game culture, anorexia, infidelity, fame hunting, and the proliferation of illicit material on the internet. As each character and each relationship is tested, we are shown the variety of roads people choose some tragic, some hopeful as it becomes clear that no one is immune to this enormous social change that has come through our phones, our tablets, and our computers. BARELY 30 minutes into Men, Women And Children you may have to fight the urge to flee from the cinema and throw your smart phone into the garbage. The new film from Jason Reitman, Men, Women And Children is a hysterical screed against communications ­technology that seems for a while like A Movie No Parent Should Miss but ends up betraying itself for the manipulative stuff it is. The soothing yet schoolmarmish tones of the ­unseen narrator (Emma Thompson) introduce us to a bunch of Texas teenagers and their parents, all of them messed up, all of them with complicated digital lives. Olivia Crocicchia plays Hannah Clint and Judy Greer plays her mother Donna. There's the star high-school football player (The Fault In Our Stars" Ansel Elgort) who has given up the sport to spend more time playing an online multiplayer game. There are schoolgirls who can't have a face-to-face conversation without texting someone else at the same time. Allison (Elena Kampouris) is on the slippery slope toward ­bulimia thanks to website "PrettyBitchesNeverEat.com" and Hannah (Olivia Crochoccia) is a narcissistic beauty queen whose former beauty queen mother (Judy Greer) promotes her online through an inappropriately raunchy website. Mirroring the digitally irresponsible mum is the over-protective mum (Jennifer Garner) who obsessively monitors her daughter's online presence, from Facebook to phone calls to even tracing her movements via GPS. Judy Greer in a scene from the film. Then there's Chris (Travis Tope), a 15-year-old online pornography addict, whose parents (Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt) are at a low ebb in their marriage and are also lured by the internet's fleshy temptations. All the performances are very strong. This is the best performance Adam Sandler's given in a long time, not that that's saying much. Based on a novel by Chad Kultgen, Men, Women And Children seems like a portrait of our disconnected times. But news flash: adultery, teen sex, depression and paranoia all existed before the ­internet. The movie simply ­assumes the worst in people. Or to put it in contemporary terms: watching it feels like being trolled. Film Men, Women and Children Released by Paramount Star rating 3/5 Director Jason Reitman Running time 119 minutes Verdict A timely but sensationalised portrayal of social media's highly antisocial effects Originally published as Watching this film feels like being trolled