[T]his is the tale of Carty and Elvis and, when the focus is on them, the film shines despite the grim feel that permeates every scene.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 30, 2019

The performances are good, actually - particularly Bell's - but the film lacks any context... Ultimately, what's it all about, pussycat? No idea.

| Aug 29, 2018

Awaydays comes close to being lumped in with every other British indie but the excellent production quality pull it through and director Pat Holden is left with another promising, if flawed, adventure.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 15, 2010

Bell's wholehearted performance and the film's convincingly scuzzy atmosphere don't make up for the big hole in the script.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 28, 2009

A quality cast, strong performances and excellent period detail keep it feeling real.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 28, 2009

There's no shortage of movies about Britain's mean streets and, for the most part, Awaydays runs with the pack.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2009

A meagre budget and a lack of clear-cut character motivations blunts the impact of what might have been a powerful Mean Streets-style study of male friendship.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2009

The film falls down in its effort to make credible the background stories of its well-performed lead characters.

| Original Score: 2/6 | May 22, 2009

A pretentious, grubbily voyeuristic paean to football hooliganism, kitted out with ubiquitous slo-mo violence, tactical post-punk hits and retro fashions.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 22, 2009

All around him the movie drips with atmosphere. The evocative sense of place is overwhelming, and perhaps the real star. Birkenhead in 1979 may not have been like this. But it is now.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2009

To these figures, Sampson applies an almost hysterical level of romanticisation, and it sort of works - especially when all the impossibly yearning post-punk music on the soundtrack really gets going.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2009

What's convincing here is the pervasive unhappiness - the movie really understands violence as a drug, a way out of a void.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 22, 2009

Awaydays is a ham-fisted coming-of-age drama that fails to say anything interesting about male relationships, violence, the 1970s or the peculiar northern soul of Liverpool.

Full Review | May 22, 2009

Awaydays is a reasonably well-crafted coming of age story and the best of the recent hooligan dramas. It would've been much more impressive, however, had it arrived before Control and This Is England.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2009

Call us old-fashioned, but we wouldn't have minded some characters to relate to, root for and care about.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2009

Lacking the empathy brought to this sort of subject by Shane Meadows, this is a one-way ticket that hits the dramatic buffers all too soon.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 22, 2009

To its credit, Awaydays does not glamorise its hooligans the way The Football Factory and Green Street did.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 22, 2009

To the music fans, it's watching Echo & The Bunnymen gigs at nightclubs; to The Pack, Awaydays contingent of football hooligans, it's fighting in car parks.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2009

Combining awayday punch-ups with bedsit brooding, the tortured relationship between the lads is generally lifeless. Things aren't helped by the film's sheer gloom, as if a layer of dust and grime lies over the camera lens. Missable.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 22, 2009

The film tries to blend Seventies music, fashion and a grim backdrop, but at heart it's a nasty and limp story told better by other movies.

| May 22, 2009