Shane Meadows’s most personal film is his best, combining the director’s impeccably observed comedy with a gathering storm cloud of ominous ill will.

| Nov 2, 2022

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

How sad and predictable is the fate of those who counsel violence as a means to an end. And yet how poignant it all seems when viewed through Shane Meadows' thoughtful lens.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 9, 2007

You wouldn't think a film about a group of British skinheads during the early 1980s could be a sweet, nostalgic coming-of-age period piece, but that's the surprise of the authentic, fresh and utterly relevant This Is England.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 9, 2007

Its tough but moving neo-realist approach make it one of the better British films of recent times.

Full Review | Nov 9, 2007

It may be the best work to date from the talented 34-year-old writer-director of Twenty Four Seven (1997).

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 7, 2007

A drama that's so potent and persuasive yet also natural and intimate that it almost has the heft of a documentary.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 7, 2007

Somewhere between the pop jouissance of Guy Ritchie and the social realism of Ken Loach, this ballsy drama freeze-frames bleak Thatcherite Yorkshire and exposes its racist underbelly.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 7, 2007

A movie about the allure of groupthink and how the warm comfort of being surrounded by peers wilts all sense of balance.

| Original Score: B | Aug 31, 2007

A hard-fisted punch of reality based on the filmmaker's experiences growing up in England's Midlands in 1983.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 31, 2007

A profoundly moving and disturbing film about the loneliness of a small boy.

| Aug 17, 2007

Until the final scene of Meadows' edgy, uneasy film, the suspense is killing.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 16, 2007

Humane and complex.

| Aug 16, 2007

Don't expect a history lesson: Shaun's story is more than enough to grab and hold your attention.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 10, 2007

Masterfully charted and acted, as are the boy's early forays into sex.

| Aug 10, 2007

There's a gutter pride taken in how aggressively Shaun confronts the world, but there's also a blunt, no-nonsense analysis of where the kid goes wrong.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 10, 2007

The movie is taut, tense, relentless. It shows why Shaun feels he needs to belong to a gang, what he gets out of it and how it goes wrong. Without saying so, it also explains why skinheads are skinheads.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 10, 2007

The writer-director brilliantly juxtaposes the personal and the political, bookending a stirring coming-of-age drama with the provocative opening and an equally affecting end sequence.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 2, 2007

It's one of the simplest and best re-creations of downscale urban England during the gritty post-punk years ever put on screen, and it's both upsetting and very funny.

| Aug 2, 2007