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

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

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

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

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

Script, editing and some poorly staged fight sequences render this inchoate and almost unforgivably uninteresting.

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

Its themes of friendship and rejection are handled with aching sincerity, but they cannot galvanise a drama too forgiving - and too much in awe - of knife-wielding yobs.

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

One for shoe-gazing musos with a guilty desire to (vicariously) stick the boot in.

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

Take all the late-70s miserablism you can stomach, mix with the usual blend of bleakness and punching, then serve lukewarm on a limp bed of can't-be-bothered.

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